Michael's Cable Action Lase-O-Rama: The Substitute (1996, Live Home Video)

A number of years back, while in college, myself and a group of friends got into a discussion about action movies. I'm not sure what prompted this--we were probably between viewings of Star Wars films and looking to kill some time or something--but we hit upon a revelation: not all action movies are the same, and we needed some sort of sub-classification to explore the distinctions, because the catch-all term "Action" didn't work. It wasn't until years later I understood this was why so much blood has been spilled in Internet flame wars over the difference between "shoegaze" and "emo" music, but like I said, I was young, I was in college, cut me some slack.

We broke 'action' down into two separate categories. There was your standard "Action" genre, where you saw people like Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson, Bruce Willis, and Arnold Schwarzenegger bringing their one-man-army breed of machismo to the screen. Think Die Hard, Mad Max, Predator, and Rambo: First Blood, Part 2. These are fantasies, often absurdist fantasies, where people think with their fists, but despite how bizarre the situation becomes, there's still a shred of normalcy about the whole thing. We can see Stallone pilot a chopper full of American POWs across the border after engaging in a game of missile chicken, and it makes a certain kind of sense despite not being terribly realistic.

Then there was "Cable Action".

"Cable Action" is a lot like obscenity, in that it's hard to define, yet you know it when you see it--usually because you're watching it on late-night cable or satellite television. "Cable Action" is what Willem Dafoe's Special Agent Smecker blames for the rampage of vigilante vengeance in Boondock Saints:

Television. Television is the explanation for this - you see this in bad television. Little assault guys creeping through the vents, coming in through the ceiling - that James Bond shit never happens in real life! Professionals don't do that!

Characters in standard action pictures usually survive by a combination of skill, training, and instinct. They often take a significant injury during the course of the picture, but they persevere anyway to win the day. The bad luck that befalls them is acceptable bad luck, the hijinks they get up to are relatively grounded in the real world, and there's often considerable byplay between the hero and the villain before the bad guy gets his comeuppance. They're the underdogs who prevail, and while it's obviously because that's how it's written in the script, the movies feel organic enough that you can't see the script happening.

"Cable Action", on the other hand, throws all this out the window. Instead of being over his head, the protagonist is at the top of his game and doing what he does best even though he may have little or no training in a given area. There may be violence, but there's often very little blood. If the film has a 17+ certification, R-rating, or other 'not for the kiddies' label, it's usually due to language more than anything else, since in US cinema classification, two or more dropped F-bombs guarantees it can't be released as anything lower than an R. Luck commonly plays a huge role in movies like this along with skill, as the character will fortunately have been prepared for just about anything save a betrayal by a former friend. The script is as obvious as a paint-by-numbers page torn out and hung on the fridge: you know from Act I exactly how all of this is going to play out. You aren't meant to believe for a second the story's events would happen like this--just turn off your brain and go with the flow.

There are probably way more levels than that to "Action Movies", but that's as far down as we drilled that evening in deciding how to classify everything from Indiana Jones and Commando to The Rock and Air Force One. One movie we didn't bring up was The Substitute, but if any of us had thought to mention it, group consensus would have been achieved in a heartbeat. The Substitute is as Cable Action-y as "Cable Action" gets.

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Tom Berenger plays Vietnam veteran and active-duty military man Jonathan Shale, who has come back to Miami after a black op in Cuba went south. Of the four-man team inserted to stir up trouble, Shale's the only one who survived the botched mission. He's extracted by the remainder of his platoon, but the scrutiny, both internal and external, leads to a Congressional investigation and a message from the US military that their services are no longer required.

Cast out on their own, Shale and the four remaining members of his team scout Miami for work as mercenaries-for-hire, only to discover the drug trade in Florida is the only operation hiring. Unwilling to work for drug traffickers, Shale decides to hole up for a while with an ex-girlfriend, Jane Hetzko, who teaches at the local public school. Unfortunately for Hetzko, her refusal to back down from local gang-banger (and her own student) Juan Lacas's threats puts her in the crosshairs of the Kings of Destruction. K.O.D. practically runs the school, and it doesn't take long for Lacas to make good on his threats. Hetzko survives an attack by a club-wielding Samoan thanks to a timely intervention from Shale, but it leaves her with a broken leg...and Shale with a desire for revenge.

Shale convinces the rest of his team to help him go undercover as a substitute teacher, hired to cover for Hetzko while she recovers from her injury, so he can disrupt the gang activity, end their drug distribution network, and shatter Lacas's hold over the rest of the students. Disguised as repairmen, custodians, and other blue-collar types, his team infiltrates the school, setting up hidden cameras and tapping phone lines to gather intel on who else might be involved in the scheme.

Shale almost immediately butts heads with Claude Rolle, the energetic, respected, and somewhat feared principal of the public school. An ex-cop who turned his sights to education, Rolle walks a thin line: on the one hand, he wants a smoothly-running school, and on the other he has to consider the legal aspects of discipline and how far teachers are allowed to go. Shale, with his forged credentials and zero experience in a classroom setting, isn't afraid to injure the students in order to command their attention and their respect.

Shale himself is walking a tightrope too, since he's not told Hetzko that he is the substitute teacher she asked him to find for her. She wouldn't approve of his techniques, nor would she be happy to learn he's putting his life on the line to get revenge on her attacker. It doesn't take long for Shale to surmise there's someone bigger than Lacas calling the shots around the school though, and when his team's surveillance unveils the true head honcho, Shale decides enough is enough and it's time to go to war. Not just for himself and his girlfriend, but for the students who want to walk the halls without constantly checking over their shoulders. Will Shale and his soldier-of-fortune buddies put a Miami drug lord out of business, or will this be the mission which sees Shale sent home in a wooden box?

Hint: it's Cable Action. You already know what happens.

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The Substitute has zero pretensions concerning its Cable Action-ness. As Roger Ebert notes in his scathing, one-star review:

I am so very tired of this movie. I see it at least once a month. The title changes, the actors change, and the superficial details of the story change, but it is always about exactly the same thing: heavily armed men shooting at one another. Even the order of their deaths is preordained: First the extras die, then the bit players, then the featured actors, until finally only the hero and the villain are left.

That right there is 'Cable Action', summed up by a far better film reviewer and writer than I'll ever be. But if you wanted to read Ebert's review, you'd visit his archives at the Chicago Sun-Times or his website. Instead you clicked my review, so sorry, not sorry.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with The Substitute as long as you understand it's not trying to do anything except rattle off a few decent one-liners, pay some of Tom Berenger's bills, and let Ernie Hudson do something other than sign autographs at a Ghostbusters convention. You don't throw a movie like this in the ol' laser disc player because you want to see top-notch drama, or a new take on the issue of problem students in inner city schools. You put The Substitute in your player because you want to see a soft-talking guy with a nasty scar punching drug dealers.

The LD I watched was a single-disc edition, CLV-format on both sides, presented in a 1.33:1 pan-and-scan format with a nice Dolby Surround mix on the Digital channel, and an uncompressed AC3 audio track on the Analog channel. One year later, Live Home Video released a widescreen version with a 1.85:1 letterboxed video transfer and identical audio options, but since this is a Cable Action movie, aspect ratio is the last thing you should worry about when it comes to home video releases. Video quality was just fine, but given the time of the movie's release, this shouldn't be surprising. Most home format distributors had figured out how to press a good quality laserdisc print by the mid-90's, and Live was no exception.

Berenger's Shale is a wish fulfillment fantasy for every time some punk back-sassed you at your job or harassed you in your neighborhood. Naturally he's got script immunity, but it's hilarious how far The Substitute goes to stretch that immunity. After he finds out Lacas and his gang are going to try and kill him after school one day, Shale dons some body armor and his pistol, then tricks the would-be killers into following him into the school library where he can take them all on through fisticuffs instead of gunshots. Naturally he's shot in the chest by one of the gang bangers, so he takes the opportunity to fall down...only to launch a surprise attack when they walk up to him to make sure he's really dead. Good thing the punk wasn't luckier: a head- or limb-shot would have ended that fight a far different way.

Instead, he gets to throw them all out a window, then apologize to the librarian for breaking all the glass and walk away, secure in the knowledge that the script says none of the gang (who all survived the short fall) will attack him again as soon as he leaves the building, or that there wasn't a second group waiting in reserve just in case the first group didn't get the job done.

This isn't how criminals operate. Like Smecker's lament up above, this is how television criminals operate. Shale relies on the script to protect him so much that I want to hire it, not him, to be my bodyguard. Later encounters with the bad guys play out in a similar fashion, as Shale survives a drive-by assassination, a betrayal by one of his own men, and even an all-out assault on the high school by a larger, better-funded group of attackers after he and his merc buddies have taken it over, because the script demands he live, not due to any superior tactics or intelligent moves on the part of his character.

The movie ends with Shale and the last surviving member of his team limping off into the sunset as we hear police sirens in the distance. Shale and his partner crack jokes and talk about where they should move to next, despite both of them having been shot at least once during the climax. Shale even remarks that at least the kids will have the school back when they return to class tomorrow.

Wait a minute--what? Those kids aren't going to have a school to return to for months. The police will be going over every inch of the place identifying bodies. They'll find the remains of several students, two custodians, one major drug dealer, a number of flunkies and lackeys for said dealer, two ex-soldiers known for working in conjunction with Shale, the frag-grenade-shredded corpse of a third operative also known to work with Shale, a good dozen contracted mercenaries, and the school principal scattered everywhere from the front sidewalk to the halls to the roof.

Multiple grenades were detonated in the building, bullet holes are everywhere, and at one point someone fires off an RPG. The resulting fires activated the sprinkler system, ensuring everything inside was drenched in water. The front doors, not to mention numerous walls, windows, and pieces of classroom equipment, have all been completely destroyed by gunfire and will need to be replaced. There's the blown-open remnants of god-only-knows how many kilos of cocaine all over the basement. It'll take forensics alone weeks just to put all the pieces together, to say nothing of all the time and money it will take to clean up the results of Shale's anti-drug operation. He might be joking about heading out to California, but there'll be an APB out on him within hours, if for no other reason than law enforcement will want to interview him as one of the few surviving witnesses to the obscene number of crimes perpetrated on the premises. That's assuming they don't charge him with criminal negligence, reckless endangerment, voluntary manslaughter, willful destruction of government property, and a half dozen other offenses they could level at him for taking the law into his own hands.

Then there's the drug issue to consider: the death of a major drug lord doesn't close down operations, it simply opens a vacuum for other people who might look to fill it. Chances are by the time the school reopens, the Miami drug pipeline will have re-opened itself courtesy of a new gang and new leadership, and the students will be no safer than they were before.

But that's the beauty of Cable Action. You just turn off your brain, and everything comes out hunky-dory. If you're Roger Ebert, you give The Substitute one star for being an unbelievable scenario made up of smaller unbelievable scenarios like some kind of cinematic fractal. If you're someone like me, who sits down and watches popcorn flicks because 'why the hell not?', then you'll give The Substitute as passing grade. It's no A+ like, say, Die Hard, but as far as my report card goes, I'd say it earns a solid C for effort. It's a painless way to pass two hours of your limited time here on this spinning hunk of rock orbiting an atomic fireball at a speed of roughly 67,000 MPH.

When you look at it that way, pretty much everything we do is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

Enjoy the trailer, and share your favorite Cable Action reminiscences in the comments below!

And yes, that is Marc "You Sang to Me" Anthony playing high school gang leader Juan Lacas in case you, uh, "Need to Know".

Sorry. I'll see myself out.