Detention Reviews

Drug-runners would temporarily hide a large cache of dope at a high school in veteran director Sidney J. Furie's far-fetched action picture with teen-empowerment message. Former U.S. military officer Sam Decker (Dolph Lundgren) decides that teaching troubled adolescents is its own minefield, and starts making plans for a career transition. When the principal discovers that Sam plans to quit, he saddles him with monitoring after-school detention. The weekend bell rings and the building is locked down, with nine people inside: Sam and his four delinquent charges, a security guard, wheelchair-bound Willy Lopes (Dov Tiefenbach), who’s hanging out in the library, and two juvies bonging weed in the basement. When Sam briefly leaves his post, two of his pupils slip away via an air duct in the detention room ceiling. But they're far from the biggest problem: International drug-runners who’ve just intercepted a cache of narcotics that were earmarked for police disposal invade the school, looking to regroup and conceal the stolen goods inside the framework of their getaway vehicles. The guard goes first when the school halls begin to echo with gunfire, and while Sam quickly sizes up the seriousness of the assault, he doesn’t know that the dealers have allied themselves with both a secret service agent and local sheriff Earl Hendorf (Larry Day). Sam locates his detainees and together they use ingenuity and athletic equipment (archery, anyone?) to keep the baddies at bay. When those run out, they turn to other materials at hand, like chemistry-lab supplies, to thin the ranks of the invaders. Unfortunately, the wily thugs lure Sam’s fiancee to the premises and use her as a bargaining chip. Sam and his students must try to save the day despite the cold-blooded mercenaries' superior firepower. Furie uses his extensive vocabulary of cinematic cliches to jazz up the action, and Lundgren fans will enjoy his buff bravado and McGyver-style knack for building makeshift weapons under pressure.