Delayed Reaction: Bad Education

Premise: A revered school superintendent gets taking down by an embezzlement scandal.

I'll start with the good. Overall, this is a quality movie. It's a tier above the normal HBO movie. Probably the best one since Behind the Candelabra, which, I believe was the last HBO movie since Bad Education to receive a major film festival premiere with plans to actually release in theaters. The cast is superb. Hugh Jackman is at his best in sly huckster roles: guys who seem perfect on the surface but are keeping a secret. I'm in the small minority of people who thought he was wonderful in The Candidate. Bad Education is a similar character but with even more charisma. Allison Janney should always be the first choice when casting a grizzled administrator type. Top to bottom, the cast is great. Ray Romano is a master of underplaying and dry delivery. These days, his every punchline has a great hesitation, like he didn't really want to say it, but the director coaxed it out of him. Geraldine Viswanathan is toward the top of my "under 25 comedy people" list. I even loved Jimmy Tatro practically reprising his American Vandal role.

The movie is pretty wonderfully paced. It reveals the scandal slowly and methodically. At each turn, the revelations feel surprising yet inevitable. Like, I didn't know whether I was surprised because it was unexpected or because I couldn't figure out how it was able to get this far in the first place. Compared to some of the original movies Netflix has been churning out during this Covid-19 self-isolation, Bad Education is as good as you'll find.

However, I feel like I'm missing something. Leading up to this movie, the reviews I was reading for this were uniformly positive. I kept reading things like "Bad Education isn't just a great HBO movie. It's a great movie" or "Career best performance by Hugh Jackman". I wouldn't go that far. It's good, not great. The movie has a watered-down Election feel to it. The humor isn't quite as dry or dark as I expected. Ideally, there are two levels to a movie based on a true story. There's how interesting the real events are and there's the commentary the movie has on the events. Bad Education captures the absurdity of the scandal and how it was uncovered, but I'm not sure it has much interesting to say about the events.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend