VLC should work fine. (you might need to set the subtitles encoding in the prefs)
As of yet, I have found that subtitles look irreparably bad in VLC if the sub track has special formatting. Check out any of the releases of "Negima!?" - All the font and color formatting is lost to VLC's renderer.
Was looking around to see if there was any plans to update that to work with new subtitle formats. (And by new, I mean not really all that new at all. This type of formatting has been around for years now.)
I, for one, don't care much about the colors being lost, but the subs are practically unreadable in VLC when formatted to have colored outlines and such.
The subs look fine when rendered in a DirectShow player such as Zoom Player when using vsfilter. However, I nabbed VLC initially to avoid having all that stuff installed on my system, so now I just sigh and have to have it.