Review: Hostage High (1997)

Hostage High (aka Detention: The Siege at Johnson High and Target for Rage) (1997)

Rated R for violence

Score: 2 out of 5

Mass shootings, and school shootings specifically, have been a grim American tradition for a long time. While advances in weapons technology trickling down to the civilian market have enabled much higher body counts than in the past (remember when the thirteen dead at Columbine High School was considered extraordinary?), the modern spree killing arguably began back in the '60s when Charles Whitman first climbed the clock tower at the University of Texas with a bunch of rifles and put his USMC sharpshooter training to use. Even before Columbine, school shootings were a common enough subject to make movies out of, as seen with this 1997 made-for-TV thriller, based on a real-life school shooting, that first aired on CBS as Detention: The Siege at Johnson High before being retitled Hostage High and Target for Rage in various home video releases. (My DVD called it Hostage High, so that's what I'm going with.) Hostage High is a very distinctly '90s take on the subject, and not just in the characters' fashion sense, the alternative rock soundtrack, and the students' nonchalant reaction to being taken hostage. The treatment of the subject matter here definitely wouldn't fly in a post-Columbine environment, between the editing of the big shooting scene to make it feel exciting and the multiple shots of the gunman, played by a young Rick Schroder with a shaggy Kurt Cobain haircut, with his shirt off looking like a hunk.

Unfortunately, it's also not a particularly good film, wearing its production values on its sleeve and generally being representative of everything that was wrong with made-for-TV movies in the '90s and early '00s before the rise of cable and later streaming spurred a renaissance in the format. It's kept interesting by a surprising standout performance from Henry Winkler as one of the protagonists, a hostage negotiator trying to talk down the shooter, but otherwise, outside of a few scenes it's a fairly bland, milquetoast mix of flat direction, hokey acting, forgettable teenage drama, and moments of unintentional hilarity. There are much better movies about school shootings out there.

This film is a loose dramatization of the Lindhurst High School shooting in Olivehurst, California in 1992, albeit with the names changed and the setting moved to the fictional Johnson High School in Sandy, Utah. Jason Copeland (Rick Schroder) is a former student at Johnson High who flunked out and is now 24, living with his mother, and struggling to make ends meet without a high school diploma, blaming his former history teacher Mr. Kroft for ruining his future. One day, he shows up at his alma mater with a shotgun and a revolver and shoots Mr. Kroft in the middle of class, and goes on to shoot multiple people until he eventually enters the music room and takes hostages. Sending kids out to bring their classmates back to the music room, on pain of him killing others if they don't return, Jason accumulates over sixty hostages before the police bring him a cell phone connecting him to Skip Fine (Henry Winkler), the police department's hostage negotiator. Skip, together with a student named Aaron Sullivan (Freddie Prinze, Jr.) who Jason assigns to answer the phone, must work to stop Jason from killing more people, whether it's by convincing him that he hasn't actually killed anyone yet (even though four people are dead) or allowing the police to deliver pizza and soda to the hostages.

For a film that's only 93 minutes long, the pacing here is pretty slow, as the plot takes a number of digressions that never really amount to much. The only subplot that's all that important concerns Travis, a friend of Aaron's who gets killed early on, particularly with regards to how he and his friend Frankie react when finding Travis' corpse; suffice it to say, it almost ruins Skip's plans to talk the killer down. Save for Aaron and, to a lesser extent, Frankie and Samantha, I had no reason to care about any of the students; they occasionally got moments to move the plot along, but never much development on their own. Looking at this film, I couldn't help but think of similar films like Dog Day Afternoon, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, and Inside Man, which were rich in interesting supporting characters among the hostages and people outside. Here, however, the kids mostly felt like blank ciphers, with some having hints of hidden depth or at least some interesting quirks (particularly the music geek clutching her cello for dear life) but most of them there to serve as nothing more than scenery.

This wound up putting the focus squarely on the main characters, and it was here where the film really suffered. Freddie Prinze, Jr. was never all that good an actor, and that was apparent here with his flat performance as Aaron. The only time when he wasn't a non-entity was in a scene that, thanks to his acting decisions, wound up dripping with homoerotic subtext that I'm pretty sure wasn't intentional. Rick Schroder had the opposite problem as Jason, frequently overacting and spending most of the film as a one-note howling psychopath; he didn't really convey that this was a guy whose grip on reality was so tenuous that he actually thought he hadn't killed anybody, even though this becomes a major plot point as the film goes on. A young Skeet Ulrich or Matthew Lillard (if you've seen Scream, you'll know what I'm talking about) probably would've knocked this part out of the park. Speaking of Scream alums, Henry Winkler was the only member of the main cast who got out with his pride intact, playing Skip as a cop who's desperate to save the kids inside (especially since one of the hostages is the daughter of one of his fellow officers) and willing to employ underhanded methods to do so, pulling out all the tricks he learned in his old job as a used-car salesman to lie to Jason and constantly misdirect him. He wound up being this film's saving grace, making the tension between him and Jason feel real and palatable. Even his good performance, however, doesn't make up for the numerous missed opportunities to explore the characters, from Jason's crappy, dead-end life to how the brilliant-but-lazy Aaron seems to be going down the same path to how Skip doesn't get much respect from his fellow officers and wants to move to the big city. All of these things are touched on in the first act, but afterwards, they're given only the briefest mention and never really play much of an important role in the proceedings.

The direction is about what you'd expect for a made-for-TV movie from the '90s. The only part where it ever really steps out above mediocrity is during the big shooting scene in the first act. Shot like an action thriller with a strong focus on Jason, it manages to convey the panic of a school shooting fairly well, while also dropping hints that Jason isn't actually trying to kill anybody (more than Schroder's performance, at any rate) in how he prefers to unload his shotgun into the school's trophy cases, loudspeakers, and other non-human targets. Afterwards, however, it mostly settles into a style that would've been fairly hokey even on a contemporary police drama, the camera spending most of its time just sitting around and recording the actors. Even with a fairly flat story, some visual style could've at least made this interesting to watch, and that just doesn't happen here.

The Bottom Line

It has its moments, particularly from Henry Winkler and the actual shooting scene, but if you want a good thriller about a school shooting, watch Zero Day, Gus Van Sant's Elephant, or "Massacre at Columbine High", an episode of the BBC docudrama series Zero Hour. This is a fairly middle-of-the-road telefilm that hasn't stood the test of time, and is only really worth watching as a curiosity concerning how school shootings were treated in pop culture before Columbine.