Detention - Duro a morire

Interesting story about a soldier in a war who misses out on saving the life of a young girl from the enemy and is haunted by this event, even though he did save many other captive children. The film flashes a head and this soldier is now a teacher in a high school that is managed mostly by policemen patrolling the hallways, bathrooms and even class rooms. In other words, the High School is a prison and most of the kids pay very little attention to their teachers or principal. Dolph Lundgren,(Sam Decker) plays the soldier/school teacher and decides he is going to quit teaching and go into another field. However, the principal asks him to have a Detention Class as his last duty as a teacher. It is at this point in the film when all Hell breaks loose and the story becomes a complete BOMB. Try to enjoy it, if you decided to View IT !

STAR RATING:*****Unmissable****Very Good***Okay**You Could Go Out For A Meal Instead*Avoid At All Costs

Sam Decker (Dolph Lundgren) is a history teacher at Hamilton High School who has tired of the attitude of the students and hands in his resignation.However,on his last night there,he is asked to supervise a detention class when drug runner Chester Lamb (Alex Karzis) and his cronies highjack the school,trapping him and the students inside.However,what he or no else had counted on was Sam,and the fact that he is also a former marine.

A couple of years back,Lundgren announced that he planned to retire from movies to spend more time with his wife and kids.However,he must have had a pretty poor pension plan or he must have just found out the hard way that the bills still needed to be payed,for all he appears to have done is taken a two year sabbatical (during which numourous projects in the pipeline either never came to fruition or were just plain scapped) before headbilling this very promising looking thriller from Sidney J Furie,who I remember as the helmer of the rather entertaining Iron Eagle movies from the late 80s.

This is a movie that I was really looking forward to seeing (and,given the lengthy wait that always seems to occupy the release of new Dolph movies to these shores,believe me,you learn how to look forward to them) and that I really thought and hoped was going to be a really entertaining movie.

Alas,the most stinging disappointments come when your hopes are really high.And,as I said already,Detention is a major disappointment.

The plots to similarly themed and plotted movies such as Under Siege and Passenger 57 have hardly been anything less than implausible,but the story here is just ridiculously improbable and utterly stupid,and just gets sillier and sillier as it progresses,like a snowball rolling down a steep hill.This is complimented by an uneven,patchy script that tears everything that looked appealing about the movie to shreds.Much like another film of Dolph's,1995's The Shooter,this is billed as an action film but said action is practically non-existent,rendering an already uninvolving affair in to something even more labourious and tedious.Karzis is a ridiculously camp,pantomine-ish villain and just gets more embarrassing as events roll on.

Detention is ultimately that most disheartening of bad films,an idea that,though done before,had the potential to be brilliant but ultimately emerges as actually less fun than a detention you may have suffered during your ol' school days.It's a little worrying too,actually,as another upcoming film of Dolph's (looks like that retirement really was a spur-of-the-moment thing!) by the name of Direct Action also has a really interesting sounding premise.One can only hope that this is just a minor glitch in the system and that that film really delivers what it promises.*

A bunch of Canadian exploitation legends were put together to make this movie - writers Paul Lynch (PROM NIGHT, BULLIES) and John Sheppard (BULLIES, AMERICAN NIGHTMARE), as well as the legendary director Sidney J. Furie (IRON EAGLE IV), who lost any directorial ability he may once have had a number of years earlier! Not that Lynch and Sheppard have had exactly stellar careers.

The movie appears to be a rip-off of the 1987 movie TERROR SQUAD, which was goofy fun. You think that with more at their disposal, this movie would be better than that one. Think again. Despite the considerable budget ($10 million), movie looks extremely cheap, with the production values of Canadian TV dramas that are typically made for about a tenth of that value! That might have been forgivable had the movie been exciting, but it isn't. None of the action scenes is particularly good. In fact, a number of them have stupid touches. (Why, when Lundgren holds a shield, doesn't the shooter just shoot him in the legs? Why, when one of the protagonists knocks a bad guy down, do they immediately run away instead of using the chance to beat on them more?)

In fact, the whole movie is full of stupid things. Why would a lockdown on the school lock down the fire exits as well? If the school is locked down, how did they get to the roof? Most importantly, why on earth did the bad guys think using a high school was their best choice? In fact, the more I think about the movie, the more dumb things come to my mind. I could go on and on, but I won't. Lundgren understandably doesn't seem that enthralled by it all, but you have to give him credit for at least putting some effort in his performance. At one point, his character reads a Clive Cussler novel. Do that instead of watching this movie - you'll be a lot more entertained, I assure you!

Detention has Dolph Lundgren former army ranger and now history and gym teacher getting stuck with supervising Detention on his last day of school. Lundgren is kind of disillusioned with teaching and surely babysitting for some of the worst motivated kids in his school is one find sendoff.

However on this day after 3:00 pm the school figures prominently in the plans of Alex Karzis and his gang of criminal misfits to pull off a robbery of drugs confiscated by the police. There's even crooked cops in on it.

Between Lundgren's kids and Karzis's gang it's quite the struggle. The whole scheme is something you might find in a Mel Brooks film and in the case of Karzis he never figured some folks would be staying after school or it would be someone like Lundgren. It's like an episode of the old A-Team series.

In the spirit of that old show, you might enjoy this rather goofy film.

I'm not sure where this genre got it's start. 'Blackboard Jungle'? It's also reminiscent of Tom Berenger's 'Substitute 1' and '2'.

Dolph's lean, and in top form, as he takes on recalcitrant students and a gang that's bent on taking over the high school.

The gang members have lots of strangely colored hair, assorted tattoos and body piercings, if you like that sort of thing, but when they shoot they can't seem to hit anything.

I especially enjoyed watching the thug on a motorcycle in a high school hallway who could neither catch nor hit with a machine gun a cripple running away in a wheel chair.

Grab the popcorn and settle back for an hour and a half of not too serious fun.