Review: Bad News Bears

The good news about Bad News Bears is that it's not quite as bad as The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl. And, well,  it's not in 3-D. The bad news is, this Billy Bob Thornton remake of the classic 1976 film The Bad News Bears, which starred Walter Matthau and Tatem O'Neal, barely made it to first base before I was ready to leave the theater. I, unfortunately, had to review it, and so for you, dear readers, I made the sacrifice of sitting through every last minute. And it wasn't fun.

Okay, first I have to get this off my chest: what the hell was Richard Linklater thinking, directing this film? The man directed Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, and The School of Rock, and he sinks to this? Wow. Just, wow. And don't get me started on Oscar winners Thornton and Marcia Gay Harden, and Oscar nominee Greg Kinnear even being in this film. All three give somewhat decent performances, given what they have to work with, but - c'mon! Why are these people slumming in a film like this? Was there a shortage of decent scripts in Hollywood in the past year?

You know the basic plot: a down-on-his-luck, briefly professional baseball player turned rat exterminator, signs up to coach a team full of misfits rejected by a  highly competitive Little League. These people are as serious about their kids' baseball as Texans are about football. Liz (Harden), the attorney mom of one of the kids, filed a lawsuit against the league to allow the rejects to play ball, and now she's signed up Morris Buttermaker (Thornton, in the role orginated by Matthau) to coach the losers to glory. Kinnear, as rival coach Roy Bullock, is given little to do besides act "manly", grab at his crotch, and bluster. He does the blustering convincingly enough, but I'd much rather watch Kinnear in a role with some subtlety.

Thornton's Buttermaker is one of the least likeable characters I've seen in a kids' film lately. Count Olaf in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events was creepy and unlikeable, but he's supposed to be an exaggerated caricature. Buttermaker is even more creepy and unlikeable because he's this gross, bawdy, totally inappropriate and seedy individual, coaching a group of vunerable children.

As Walter Matthau portrayed the same part, Buttermaker was down on his luck, yes, and he drank heavily - but he did it in that gruff-but-likeable way that was his particular speciality. He didn't have the same creepy vibe that Thornton imbues his character with. Sure, at the end, Thorton's Buttermaker, like Matthau's, softens up a bit and realizes he's a jerk, but it just doesn't have the same sense of sincerity that Matthau brought to the part. Thorton brings too much Bad Santa to the part of Buttermaker, and that makes the character, and thus the film, inherently unlikeable.

The biggest issue I have with this movie, though, is its general offensiveness. And believe me, I am not a girl who gets offended easily. This is, ostensibly, a film targeted at families, yet from beginning to end there was almost as much profanity as a Quentin Tarantino film (well, to be fair, Bad News Bears doesn't use the "F word", but other than that pretty much every thing is fair game). Buttermaker does his share of cursing in the film, but the kids have the foulest mouths of all. Now, understand: I have no issue with cursing, especially in adult films, but in a film targeted at children, what is the point of every other word being "asshole" or "goddamn"? And every other joke referencing male genitalia? Seriously.

Several families around us got up and walked out about a third of the way through the film. In addition to the foul language, there are just some generally troublesome moments. Like, Buttermaker commenting about the "fine ass" on a teenage softball player. Buttermaker passing out drunk at a practice. Buttermaker driving the kids around in his old, convertible Cadillac, no one in seatbelts, with three of the kids balanced precariously on top of the back seat. Like, a child falling out of the car as he's driving - whoo boy! that's funny! And how about Buttermaker having the kids work for him in his extermination business, not batting an eye as two of the kids spary each other with chemicals. And let's not forget, Buttermaker having one of the kids make him a martini.

I don't know what kind of parents these kids are supposed to have, but no parent I know would let their kids hang around a creepy guy like Buttermaker, riding around unsecured in a convertible with a man with a drinking problem and going to post-game parties at Hooters. You rarely see the parents in the film, so presumably they are all so stupid that they took one look at Buttermaker, with his boozy breath, leering ways and foul language, and thought to themselves, "Hey! That's just the kind of guy I want my young son hanging out with!"

As for the kids' acting - what is with these movies that have a bunch of kid actors that cannot act their way out of a box? I mean, I realize that Dakota Fanning and Freddie Highmore can't be in everything, but surely there are tons of very talented kid actors not getting jobs in kid films while they keep filling roles with kids who can't act. Not everyone can act, people. It's a gift, it takes hard work to learn,  and just because a kid looks somewhat cute on screen does not mean they have acting talent.

Newcomer Sammi Kraft, as Amanda, the daughter of Buttermaker's ex-girlfriend and superstar pitcher who saves the team, turns in a performance as wooden as a baseball bat. In real life, she's a star ballplayer, and she was discovered for this film on the baseball diamond. She has a mean pitching arm, but the kid is just not an actress. It's not her fault, she didn't cast herself, and I'm sure she has an excellent future as an athlete. But not as an actress.

The rest of the kids are mostly newcomers as well. A couple of them turn in decent performances, but they spend so much of the film fighting each other, hitting each other, and cursing at each other, that what little good acting there is gets lost in the wash. One of the kids is in a wheelchair, and boy, do they have fun with that! The parapalegic kid (newbie Troy Gentile) gets to have an attitude about being in a wheelchair, always being defensive about his situation. Unfortunately, his surliness just doesn't ring true, and so his lines come across with this one-dimensional, After School Special quality.

Bad News Bears is also full of bad jokes. Who thought it would be funny to have Buttermaker condescendingly talking "street" to the black kid, making dumb jokes about the Armenian kid, telling the requisite fat boy, "nice tits", making fun of the Mexican kids - boy, it just doesn't get any better than this in a kid's film, does it? Did somebody just pull out a copy of "Stereotypical Racial and Social Jokes" while writing the script?

When I walked out of the movie, my biggest regret was that I'd taken my 8-year-old daughter to see it with me. Usually she enjoys attending family films with me, but she was unusually quiet walking out of the theater.  I asked her how she felt about the film, and she said she didn't really get what it was about or what the point was (and this is a kid who is breezing through the new Harry Potter book - she's pretty astute). She got that it was about kids who played baseball badly, and that they got better, but she didn't understand any of the dialouge at all, and she didn't enjoy the film. I asked what she thought about the language, and she wrinkled her nose and said, "I thought it was inappropriate. Especially the kids. Kids shouldn't talk that way and use those all bad words, even for a movie".

Amen to that, kiddo. Next time, I'm only dragging her with me to films that have a reasonably decent chance of being worth her while.