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The Substitute 3: Winner takes All (1999)

Dir: Robert Radler

After things go wrong in Kosovo for veteran mercenary Karl Thomasson (Treat Williams, "Deep Rising") he promises his dying friend Macy to return his medal to his estranged Daughter, Nicole (Rebecca Staab).

Three months later Karl visits a bitter Nicole, who is a University Professor at Eastern State, to give her Father's medal.
Nicole has been having trouble with some football jocks in her class and threatens to fail them if they carry on disrupting the class, something that could kill their fledgling careers and damage the current run of good fortune the team is experiencing thanks to illegal steroid taking.

One night Nicole is brutally beaten up by a masked man, so Karl calls in his mercenary friends Rahmel (James Black) and Suzy (Claudia Christian, "Maniac Cop 2") to find out who attacked Nicole and to uncover what's going on at the school.

Using computer whiz Ed Lincoln (Frank Gerrish) Karl fixes it so he is made the recovering Nicole's replacement at the University.
But the conspiracy goes further than just a few jocks. It seems that Tony Lo Russo (David Stevens), the psychotic son of the local Mob boss, is the one supplying the steroids...

 

This second sequel to the Tom Berenger original was produced for America’s cable HBO channel, but don’t let that put you off as HBO screen shows and films far more explicit than normal TV. As such “The Substitute 3” pulls no punches in delivering the violence and even a spot of nicely gratuitous T& A.

The likeable Treat Williams (who went from support in big movies to the lead in B movies) does a solid job as the hard as nails Karl and certainly has fun in the (sadly quite few in number) scenes with the students.
The classroom highlight has to be when Karl delivers a lesson on how a smaller force can overcome a greater force where he emphasises each point with a good punch to the retarded jock man-mountain that needs the education. It’s wildly improbable…and damn satisfying!

But this is a film that knows it’s cheesier than an Olympic runners socks and Director Robert Radler (“Best of the Best”) plays up the fact with great aplomb.
But it’s cheese blended with a hefty dose of the old ultra-violence, which includes such wanton brutality and hijacks as many a bone crunching blow, a knife through the throat, multiple stabbings, baseball bat mayhem, hot grill facial reconstruction, samurai sword limb lopping, vicious finger snapping, electrocution break-dancing, throat slitting, a serving tray smack-down and lots of bloody firearms carnage.

There's some well used humour though as well with the smooth way Karl winds up the jocks and the interplay between the mercenaries. Jolly highlight is the rotund cyber slob Ed Lincoln who has plenty of likeable one liners and is at his best when ogling Suzy‘s breasts through his hidden camera when she goes undercover at a titty bar; "If I had those, I'd love to touch them".
Treat Williams plays off Frank Gerrish’s character wonderfully and they make a nice light-hearted partnership between the violence.
Dialogue is macho in the extreme, but again the film is clever enough to know it. I mean you have to love lines like "diplomacy is over" delivered before much violence is dealt out to some well deserving scumbags.

Other performances are above average for this kind of film and Claudia Christian makes for a very sexy, kick ass, female lead and the underused James Black is suitably stoic with his lethal blade.

But as mentioned already it’s not all death and destruction as we have to fit in a gratuitous (though it enlivens the slowish/surveillance heavy middle section) wet t-shirt competition, lots of flashed panties, and naked bimbos fleeing from machine gun fire. All essential to the plot naturally.

A perfect guitar heavy and rather funky score by Tor Hyams punctuates the action perfectly as well.

It’s not all positive though.
Nicole’s 'you can't make your own morality and use violence as a means to an end' preaching gets a bit tired (especially as we all know that in the world of trashy exploitation crowd-pleasers...she's just plain wrong!) and we could have done with a few more scenes in the actual classroom and a bigger smack=down of the arrogant jocks.
In fact, in the only real screenplay flaw, the football team angle is pretty much dropped later and unless I missed something we never find out who exactly attacked Nicole and started the chaos off in the first place!

But the interplay between the characters, the amusing dialogue, the fun set-pieces, and a great mobster takedown finale make up for the shortcomings in the plotting department and the action is so wonderfully violent (and utterly merciless) that viewer satisfaction is ultimately delivered.