****

Run Time: 1 hour 48 minutes

Rating: TV-MA

Stars: Hugh Jackman, Allison Janney, Ray Romano

Writer: Mike Makowsky

Director: Cory Finley

Hugh Jackman has made just four movies in the past three years, and with each passing performance he is proving himself to be perhaps the most multifaceted actor working today.

Think about it: in 2017’s Logan he rewrote the book on bringing authentic intensity to a super hero character. The following year his Broadway musical chops singlehandedly saved The Greatest Showman. A few months later he triumphed as the brilliant yet infuriatingly haughty, self-destructive presidential candidate Gary Hart in The Front Runner.

There’s a touch of Hart in Frank Tassone, the guy Jackman plays in his latest film, Bad Education. For one thing, both men are real-life figures who plummeted from rock star-like status to pariah in less time than it took for them to comb their perfectly coiffed hair. And both were brought to their ends largely by their misplaced sense of indestructibility.

But while Hart merely took himself down, Tassone was something of a human neutron bomb. As superintendent of schools in the tony Long Island bedroom community of Roslyn during the early 2000s, Tassone was lionized for raising the formerly middling school district to national elite status. But his legion of fans didn’t realize he was also presiding over the single largest public school embezzlement scandal in U.S. history.

What did Frank Tassone know, and when did he know it? Peeling the layers off that onion is just one of the great delights of Mike Makowsky’s script. What’s more, Makowsky, who wrote last year’s utterly brilliant but little-seen I Think We’re Alone Now, was born to write this screenplay: He was a middleschooler in Roslyn at the time his superintendent was led off in cuffs.

Jackman is in full can’t-take-your-eyes-off-him mode as Tassone, blinding students, faculty, and board of education members alike with his dazzling charm, impossibly chiseled features, and a smile that could guide the space shuttle in for a landing. One of the fun tricks of Bad Education is how Tassone checks off every box in everyone’s fantasy of (READ MORE)