There Are Probably Better Ways to Pay Tribute to the Late Treat Williams Than by Revisiting His Performance in The Substitute 4: Failure Is Not an Option But That's What We're Going With

bunch of haters mad that the Nazis are the bad guys in this one.

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Racists rarely admit that they’re racist. Take Donald Trump. That dude was racist as fuck. The evidence that Trump has been an appalling and unrepentant racist all his damn life is damning and voluminous. Yet not only did Trump not admit to being the tiniest bit racist, he frequently professed to be the least racist person in the world, without a single racist bone in his body. 

That’s because we live in a culture that is deeply racist but pretends that it’s not because we at least have the decency to portray racism as a very negative quality, an insidious cultural poison. 

So you have to be pretty damn proud of your bigotry to loudly profess to having not just one racist bone (which, if you’re keeping track, is officially one more than Trump has in his entire body) but a whole body full of them, as well as racist muscles, racist blood and a racism-poisoned cerebellum. 

That’s not how it works in the wonderfully silly 2001 direct-to-video sequel The Substitute 4: Failure Is Not an Option. Not only are the two primary villains candid and utterly unapologetic about their White supremacism and anti-Semitism: they lead with them. 

my mother abandoned me, and also died, but otherwise this would be useful information!

These over-the-top heavies practically introduce themselves with, “A fun fact about me is that I think the Holocaust didn’t happen and refer to black people as monkeys. And I love barbecue!” 

Brack, the evil leader of sinister Neo-Nazi teen cult The Werewolf Company, tests our hero’s character and gauges his racism level when he says of Haiti, “Now there’s an exercise in minority management. Did you ever do the Lambada with those dark ladies over there?” 

Our racism-hating hero is polite enough to demur that he didn’t have much time for dancing during his time in Haiti but his body language and facial expression silently but unmistakably convey, “I do not approve of your racist and, frankly, bizarrely dated language.”

A teen psycho way too into the homoerotic Fascist shenanigans of the Werewolf Company, meanwhile, makes the worst possible impression on our nice guy hero when he introduces himself as the new military history teacher and, crazy eyes alive with hate, asks if he’s going to teach them about the lies that have shaped American military history, like that six million Jews died during the Holocaust. 

This is a bold tactic, reader. Sure, an evil Neo-Nazi cult flourishes as the sinister core of this malevolent military academy but you can’t just go around assuming that everyone you meet is a Holocaust denier like yourself. You’re bound to be wrong at least some of the time. Even in the South. 

But before this agreeably silly romp can explore the cartoonish evil of Neo-Nazi military school cults it first delivers the bummer news that we as a culture pretty much defeated racism in the South, but, like Palpatine, it unexpectedly returned. 

Failure Is Not an Option opens with hilariously earnest narration from a public radio editorialist earnestly explaining, “Here in the American South, the bad old days of bigotry and intolerance are mostly behind us. We’ve learned to live and work together. But now this peaceful corner of America has been rocked by a mysterious campaign of intimidation and destruction, all of it aimed at minorities. These outrages have encouraged other bigots to come out and try to spread their poison.”

Damn! The peaceful corner of our nation known as the South came THIS close to finally licking its unfortunate racism problem once and for all but then some hatred-fueled knuckleheads had to go and ruin it for everyone. 

But who are these knuckleheads pushing the very un-American concept of “racism?” They’re the members of an elite military school’s Werewolf Company. Now the Werewolf Company may be an unfortunate gaggle of racists, anti-Semites and Hitler lovers who do things like have shirtless homoerotic dance parties where they mosh by an open fire while shouting “White Power!” but they have an awesome name. 

They have such a great name, in fact, that I am tempted to change the name of this website from Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place to The Werewolf Company. I probably won’t because I’ve spent four long, hard, joyful years trying, and sometimes even succeeding, in making Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place a thing but it’s tempting. 

A-Roo! Werewolf Company of the American South!

As the movie opens, Karl Thomasson (the late, beloved Treat Williams, a more than acceptable substitute for Tom Berenger, who stared in the original film before the Hair star took over in the trilogy of sequels that followed), an ex-Special Forces soldier turned mercenary is in the field of battle with a fellow mercenary quipping up a storm before they discover that one of the men they’ve killed is just a boy, and has a weird Swastika-like symbol on his head. 

Being a good dude, Karl is upset that a man he fatally shot is only a teenager. He wants the men whose lives he ends with a bullet to at least be twenty. Karl is ready for a change of pace so when an old friend asks him to once again go undercover as a teacher, this time in a Southern military school, in order to investigate the Werewolf company, he acquiesces. 

At the school Karl quickly learns that the school’s culture can best be described as “Klu Klux Klanny.” Sinister Colonel J.C. Brack (Patrick Kilpatrick) has transformed the Werewolf Company into a white power cult that also does crimes in exchange for money and also just for the fun of it. 

The handsome new teacher soon falls into bed with Dr. Jenny Chamberlain (Angie Everhart), a beautiful doctor on hand to sleep with the hero, then do an utterly gratuitous nude scene, then sleep with the bad guy as well. 

From that point on it’s Treat Williams versus the Nazis, with an old military buddy and an eccentric, solitary figure played by the great Bill Nunn assisting the veteran actor in his war on racists. 

I like action movies where the bad guys are racists and Nazis and bigots because they tend to be vulgar and campy and over-the-top in a fun, lurid way and because there’s just something deeply satisfying about seeing racists get punched in the face. 

That’s why it was so great when Richard Spencer got punched in the face? Remember that? That was great. Wanna see that again? Here you go! 

The Substitute: Failure Is Not an Option delivered on both levels. It was enjoyably stupid and over the top in its depiction of cartoon racists who are practically feral and it also offers the crowd-pleasing skeptical of Treat Williams beating up lots of hate-mongers half his age. 

I was also amused that while the Tom Arnold/David Paymer comedy Carpool listed dozens upon dozens of stunt performers this action movie lists just two, one of whom is David Lietch, who would go on to be the uncredited co-director of John Wick and the director of Deadpool 2. 

I’m guessing you have to be pretty damn good to handle ALL of the stunts for a violent, set-piece-filled action movie with just one other dude and while Substitute: Failure Is Not an Option is no Hooper it does have its share of action. 

I got a little more out of this as well because I’ve gained a new appreciation for Williams based on his Twitter feed, which establishes that he’s a lovely human being, somebody’s nice dad and pretty much everything you would hope he would be. 

I don’t want to over-sell Substitute: Failure Is Not an Option but as direct-to-video third sequels to bad movies go it’s a lot of goofy fun and offers a giddy element of wish fulfillment in that in this world at least the good guys win and the racists all meet terrible ends and people are at least able to hold onto the delusional belief that racism is nearly over here in the United States, and just needs that final push to wipe it out completely.