“Teacher” (** out of four) was a heavy-handed melodrama about a high-school English teacher (David Dastmalchian) who is beset and disturbed by an increasingly violent and wealthy bully (Curtis Edward Jackson) who causes his life to gradually fall apart. When the school and the police can’t do anything due to the boy’s rich father (Kevin Pollak) and he subsequently loses his job, he begins to take matters into his own hands. Good performances can only do so much with this unpleasant story and film never fully gets off the ground. Samuel L. Jackson played a similar teacher in 1997’s more stylish and surreal “187.”