Where to watch Detention
1 1/2 Stars
Hamilton High is no place for a teacher who cares. Teacher Sam Decker doesn’t care anymore. He’s quitting. Sam marks his last day in the battleground of public education by getting saddled with the detention class after hours, playing warden to a pack of rebellious students, the worst troublemakers in school. But Hamilton High is about to become an all too real battleground when a well-organized group of killers armed with automatic weapons and explosives invade the supposedly deserted school after hours to use it as an operating base for meticulously planned armored car robbery. Led by the brilliant and sadistic Chester Lamb, the invaders are surprised to discover Sam and the kids from the detention room are still inside the school. The hunt is on as the killers ruthlessly stalk the teacher and students through the school’s halls and classrooms, while Lamb tracks them on the surveillance cameras, turning the school’s security system against his prey. Sam and the kids band together and manage to combat the armed thugs and foil Lamb’s perfectly planned crime. Along the way, they discover a sinister conspiracy that reaches to the police department and even the highest level of government. But Sam Decker still has a few tricks to teach the kids, and he’s got some thingfs to learn from them. Tonight at Hamilton High, the lesson is survival.
Detention stretches its thin-story premises to the point of near-breaking. The moment the movie became a comedy for me was when a wheelchair-bound student outran a bad guy atop a chopper with a machine gun flying down the locker-filled hallways of a high school. Director Sidney J. Furie does his best to bring visual excitement to this Die Hard clone on a threadbare budget. Dolph Lundgren is the film’s stoic leading man capable of holding attention while on-screen, but the movie drags when the story follows the eccentric head villain or bickering student hostages.
Lundgren has made far worse movies and much better ones, too. Detention falls into the middle to low range of his extensive and ever-growing filmography. The students are given too much screen time, making you wonder if they are the main characters or Dolph. Detention does what it can to generate excitement on a limited budget and confined location. I prefer Command Performance, a movie directed by Lundgren that has a similar story, to this one.
Directed by: Sidney J. Furie
Written by: Paul Lynch, John Sheppard
Starring: Dolph Lundgren, Alex Karzis, Kata Dobó