BEFORE: This one's a no-brainer, Ice Cube carries over from "Higher Learning" for another school-based film.
THE PLOT: When one school teacher unwittingly causes another teacher's dismissal, he is challenged to an after-school fight.
AFTER: OK, it turns out this film is set on the LAST day of school, and it's September IRL, so that doesn't really work, but a film about school is a film about school at this point. Keeping the chain alive is more important than worrying about finding the perfect month to watch every film in.
The lead character is a teacher, who finds himself being bullied by another teacher - a bigger, stronger, more "urban" teacher. But haven't we all been bullied by somebody at one point? I mean, aren't we all mild-mannered English teachers, on the inside? OK, maybe that's a bit of a stretch. Or are we riffing on the fear that white Americans tend to have, that inside every black person is a thug waiting to come out? That's what's really behind racism, right? It's fear, in one form or another.
I may be reading too much into this, because the film doesn't really get into race issues, it sort of skirts neatly around them. The teacher with anger issues and a hair trigger just happens to be black, I get it. And the lead is a white everyman with a wife and a daughter and another kid on the way. Then there's the other fear that's referenced here, the fear of losing one's job. Everyone knows that feeling, right? When you'll do anything to save your job, throw your co-worker under the bus or imply to the boss that they simply can't run the place without you. Truth is, everyone is replaceable in one form or another, but that deep fear that if you lose your job you may never find another one, or another one as good? That just never goes away.
What's weird here is that the teacher who's a bully, the one with anger issues, also seems to be a pretty good teacher, since he refuses to give the students a free period, even though it's the last day of class. Nobody's ever accomplished anything on the last day of anything - but then if we all skated on the last day, then the temptation is there to slack off on the NEXT to last day, too. It's a slippery slope.
The film's star and director come from the show "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia", which I haven't seen a lot of, but I know the humor in the series comes from being more and more outrageous, to the point of almost becoming nonsensical. There's a bit of that feel here, too, as the pranks that the students pull seem mostly unbelievable, certainly some of them seem like they're on a professional level, or would break the bank of the average teen. But who knows, maybe in this new world of social media that's exactly what people feel they need to do these days to get attention. The news of the #teacherfight goes viral, and maybe that's possible too given today's circumstances. For me it's been a long time since high-school, and we had a "Prank Day" during Homecoming Week, but it was nothing like this.
(I was prepared to call a NITPICK POINT on the student's use of a cell phone to control a VCR - like, why would the newest technology be able to control an old device like a VCR? But I did a little research, and some of the newer Samsung phones are capable of emitting infra-red signals, and there are apps that enable them to control TVs and DVD players and yes, even VCRs. So there you go, no NP.)
The overall situation of a lead character having a bad day, that's pretty standard - we've seen it in everything from "Due Date" to "Girls Trip" to "Raising Arizona". This takes it a little over-the-top in that so many things happen to this guy in one day, that school day would need to be 17 hours long to fit all this into it, but it's all in the name of comedy. (If anything, it's hard to believe that meetings between teachers and the superintendent would take place DURING the school day, and not after.)
Whether you're willing to suspend your disbelief to allow all these shenanigans to take place is up to you. Same goes for the fight itself, when it finally happens it's all very choreographed, also quite unbelievable, but also funny in the end.
I couldn't really get a handle on the French teacher, they really didn't develop her character enough to be easily understood. It's hard to even say where they were trying to go with her. But nearly everything else, I'm sort of forced to allow.
Also starring Charlie Day (last heard in "The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part"), Tracy Morgan (last heard in "The Boxtrolls"), Jillian Bell (last seen in "Game Over, Man!"), Christina Hendricks (last seen in "Pottersville"), Dean Norris (last seen in "Secret in Their Eyes"), Kumail Nanjiani (last seen in "Hello, My Name Is Doris"), Dennis Haysbert (last seen in "Kodachrome"), JoAnna Garcia Swisher (last seen in "The Internship"), Kym Whitley (last heard in "Rango"), Conphidance, Max Carver, Charlie Carver (last seen in "I Am Michael"), Stephnie Weir, Alexa Nisenson, Austin Zajur, Gordon Danniels (last seen in "Gifted"), Bill Kottkamp, Robert Pralgo (last seen in "American Made"), Michael Beasley (last seen in "The Accountant"), Terence Rosemore, James Donadio, Winston James Francis.
RATING: 5 out of 10 9-1-1 operators
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