Bad Teacher

Bad: adjective - not good in any manner or degree.

While that definition is appropriate for the film, it’s not in the way the creators wanted.

In short, Bad Teacher was boring, not funny, poorly written, badly acted, miscast and incredibly predictable.

So yeah, it was bad.  Let’s shine some light on the details, shall we?

Bad Teacher is ostensibly a movie about a selfish, money-grubbing, uncaring woman who is looking to live the cozy life at someone else’s expense.

Sound kind of familiar?  Yes, this movie does stylize itself as a cousin to Bad Santa.  Sure, there are differences.  No incredibly foul-mouthed kids or crazy lackeys are anywhere to be found.  However, the similarities are there.  Both of them want you to root for the anti-hero.  Both of them have a running theme of selfish, self-destructive main characters that have a general lack of goodwill towards anything decent.  But only one of them has the decency to make sure the main character doesn’t magically learn their lesson due to a cheesy, hackneyed conversation.

            Bad Teacher stars Cameron Diaz as a woman who was just about to get everything she wanted by marrying a rich man when, of course, the wedding is called off at the last minute.  This forces her to go back to teaching at the school she had just quit.  However, since she is just a gold-digger, she cannot stand trying to get by on a teacher’s salary and never stops trying to find another sugar-daddy. 

            The sugar-daddy for the rest of the film is played by Justin Timberlake, who, to his credit, is game for all the stupid shit his character is asked to do.  Somehow we are supposed to believe that his character is a naïve, creepy, nerdy sycophant who happens just so happens to be super rich and a substitute teacher.

            The ‘antagonist’ is Amy Squirrel (Lucy Punch), a walking parody of every cheesy ‘nice but crazy’ cliché the writers were able to dig up.  In fact, the only person who has any half decent lines in this film is Jason Segel, as the gym teacher who never stops pursuing Diaz’s bitch of a character.  Jason seems in on the fact that the movie is pretty crappy and delivers his lines in a very confident, breezy manner.  This somehow improves his dialog and yes, both times I laughed were due to him. 

            That’s the plot in a nutshell.  Elizabeth (Diaz) wants a rich man, Scott (Timberlake) happens to be rich but is falling for Amy, and Russel (Segel) wants Elizabeth.  However, Elizabeth thinks she needs a boob job in order to reel Scott in, but has no money.  That’s it.  It takes fifteen minutes to set up this premise and then the movie spends the next hour and change showing Cameron Diaz’s increasingly desperate efforts at making money.  Then, magically, something she says to one student strikes a chord and she suddenly decides to become a better person.  While she does not pull a complete 180, it’s certainly 150 degrees or more from her original personality.

            The biggest problem is that I just don’t see Cameron Diaz as the right person for the role.  Bad Santa worked because Billy Bob Thornton was already known as kind of an asshole.  I’m not sure if Diaz chose this role just to shake up her image, but she is never really convincing as a selfish jerk.  Plus, for whatever reason, she is starting to show her near-forty age, and that just makes her pursuit of Timberlake seem more ‘creepy-cougar’ than the ‘hilarious gold-digger’ that they were aiming for.

            Add all of that to the fact that there were any jokes and the pacing was absolutely terrible.  The other decent comedians sprinkled into the movie were also wasted on terrible roles.  This goes especially for Thomas Lennon, whose comedic talents are squandered as the dumb, horny, gullible guy that Cameron’s character needs to seduce in order to get her hands on the answers to the state test.

            In case I didn’t make myself clear, Bad Teacher is an all-around bad movie.  While I do appreciate Hollywood’s recent attempt at making more R rated comedies to cater to adults, they don’t need to greenlight a film JUST BECAUSE it is R rated.  Do yourself a favor and go watch your favorite comedy.  Hell, go watch your favorite horror movie and you’ll probably laugh more than you would at this film.  I think the only comedy I hated more than this was The Animal.  (In my defense, the only reason I even started watching that was because I was 20 years old in a casino town with absolutely nothing to do….and even then I had the brains to walk out of the theater thirty minutes in.)