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This last week I have been pretty much into the Die Hard rip-offs again, and of course the bottom of the barrel as I’ve seen all the high profiles now more than once. So after B-movie fare like Icebreaker and TV-movie Breakaway I just finished watching a Swedish subtitled version of Detention, a movie from 2003 starring Dolph Lundgren and directed by Sidney J. Fury and when I read that name it rang a bell. This was the guy responsible for Superman IV: The Quest for Peace and one of the earliest Die Hard Rip-offs: 1991’s “The Taking of Beverly Hills“. He also directed three Iron Eagle movies so as you can see he’s pretty much a veteran of action movies in the B-realm. Detention is no different.
Detention is Die Hard in a school again, but instead of a student, teacher Sam Decker (Lundgren) is the main opponent for the bad guys who have taken over the school on a Friday afternoon when they were only expecting a security guard and not a teacher who’s former military with a couple of students held in detention. Each of these kids has a defining attribute about them; the hot chick, the guy in the wheelchair, the pregnant teen and even two token black kids; one a gang member the other a jock. So it’s basically Die Hard with the The Breakfast Club.
Surprisingly though Lundgren is hardly the one man killing machine you would expect him to be. He holds himself up but the kids he’s supposed to be protecting hold themselves up maybe even more than good old Dolph. Separated from all of each other, these kids are all over the place as is Dolph and they all seem to be a master in evading bullets. This is one of the elements of what made the movie silly; these kids running through the halls and these assassins emptying their machine guns at them and hitting everything but one of these kids.
But that’s not all..
There is a chase between a motorcycle and a wheelchair through the corridors of school, as already mentioned one of the teens is pregnant, Dolph patches himself up after taking a bullet in the arm. When he gets shot a second time it doesn’t seem to hurt him at all, despite the fact that the bullet hit him in the chest.
And than there are the bad guys…
These guys reminded me of the Dreadknoks from the G.I. Joe cartoon. The leader, who has blond highlights in his hair, is constantly going over the top in his performance, the now cliche extremely lethal female assassin Gloria, constantly named pussycat, wears a bright pink wig. Then there are two brothers of which one has some sort tattoo on the top of his bald head and a ring/necklace goring from ear to nose, something that will probably be very handy when in combat. The other simply has blue hair.
I also could not figure out what their elaborate plot would be and how the school setting came of use other than it was the center of all the stuff they needed. It involved heroin that was taken from a police car which passed the school and then the heroin was loaded into a car in the auto shop of that school which was apparently planted there earlier by the bad guys. It didn’t really make much sense.
Despite its ridiculousness the movie was fast paced and pretty entertaining. It’s a simple B-action movie for a certain crowd who digs these kinds of movies. There’s nothing much to praise here, but then there’s nothing much to hate also. Seeing a couple of kids going all Wilhelm Tell on the bad guys made me cringe and laugh at the same time, the same goes for some armor that Lundgren and a student built, it looked so ridiculous. I guess that sums this movie up in one word:
Ridiculous.
