Kevin Reynolds' 187 is a bleak, disturbing film that just misses being a great piece of movie making, largely because of the lack of restraint Reynolds and his director of photography, Ericson Core, showed in their use of cinematic pyrotechnics.
The film centers on a New York high school teacher named Garfield (Samuel L. Jackson) who, in the beginning, is a teacher like those we've seen before: He's Sidney Poitier in To Sir, With Love or Edward James Olmos in Stand and Deliver— a creative educator who cares that his students make something of themselves. But this is a different world than that in earlier films. Although Poitier's and Olmos' characters had to deal with gangs and students sunk so deep in poverty they could see no way out, that was "gritty reality" softened through the gauze of celluloid — a few jokes, a field trip, a couple of songs, and the students fell into line.
The roughness of the world that Garfield inhabits isn't mitigated at all. When his principal tells him early on that he's mistaken if he thinks he can get through to the students in his class, he isn't giving him one of those movie challenges as administrators have in other education movies, and to which the protagonist replies, you say I can't do it, but I will, and that will be the mark of my heroism, and we'll all go home at the end of the movie feeling triumphant and believing firmly in education's capacity to change the world. In 187 (police code for homicide), students really don't care (many are there because they're under house arrest) and before the first 10 minutes are past, Garfield learns just how hostile the environment is, as a student he failed stabs him repeatedly.
Fifteen months later, Garfield has relocated to the San Fernando Valley, and is taking cautious steps to reenter teaching. Soon, however, he learns that the environment is no different on the Pacific coast than it is on the Atlantic, and he finds himself challenged by brutal gang member after brutal gang member. Eventually, someone at the school begins extracting revenge — it may be Garfield, or it may be a cynical history teacher, or one of the other students. One student turns up dead, another has his trigger finger crudely amputated.
What carries the film more than anything is Jackson's performance. To say it's riveting risks descent into clich‚, but it is that: When he's on screen, you can't not watch him. Partly this is because he's such an interesting character. Unlike the teachers in Stand and Deliver and To Sir, With Love, who experienced only momentary doubt about what they were doing, Garfield is fearful — of violence against him yes, but more significantly, fearful that he's made a terrible mistake in his life, that his fundamental belief — in the possibility of salvation through education — is a sham. Primarily, however, the power comes from Jackson, from his understanding that power comes not from the surface, from volume and wild gestures, but from restraint, from, in terms he uses in his classroom, potential energy rather than kinetic. This also allows his final scene, in which he finally does explode, to carry more force, because we've been waiting for it from almost the first frame.
It's too bad, however, that the film's director and director of photography didn't understand the value of restraint themselves, because it's in their cinematic excesses that the film falls short. 187 is Core's first feature as a director of photography after a career making music videos, and his past life shows in the film's annoying penchant for disconcerting camera angles, for overuse of slow-motion, for close-up after close-up of grim-faced gang members striding purposefully toward some violent act. It's been boring on MTV for years, and it's boring here.
If you can ignore that, however, the film is gripping, albeit extraordinarily difficult to watch, because I can't stress enough how relentless it is in its utter bleakness. If you want a film that makes you feel good about urban America near the turn of the century, about American urban youth, and the bright promise of academia, don't see this one. If you can steel yourself for two hours of nearly unceasing physical and psychological violence, however, and want to see Jackson in a role that reminds us that he is one of our finest film actors, go.
But when you're sitting in the theater after the final credits, stunned and drained, don't say you weren't warned.
by Joe Schuster
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