Director: Jake Kasdan (Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, Orange County)
Starring: Cameron Diaz, Lucy Punch, Justin Timberlake, Jason Segel
Currently In Theaters
Bad Teacher isn't really a bad movie. It's just not good, either. The film tries far too hard to be something that it isn't, and when it finally figures that out, the movie ends.
Bad Teacher is the story of Elizabeth Halsey (Diaz), a gold-digging teacher who quits her job and then gets immediately dumped by her rich fiancee. Halsey decides that getting a boob job will give her a better chance of meeting another millionaire. The problem is that she's now broke. Halsey decides to start teaching again so she can raise enough money for the surgery. Along the way she meets Amy (Punch), a teacher obsessed with being the best; Russell (Segel), a gym teacher who likes Halsey; and Scott (Timberlake), a substitute teacher whose family is wealthy. That's pretty much the entire story. I'm not complaining about it, it's just a simple story that was obviously chosen to lay jokes on top of.
It becomes very obvious very fast that the people who made Bad Teacher really want this movie to be Bad Santa, and I don't just say that because of the name. The main characters are completely unsympathetic and a douche to everyone. The problem is that Elizabeth Halsey has zero character arc in the entire film. In Bad Santa, Thornton's character was a dick, but somewhere around the one hour mark, they give you reasons to think he could be a good person (helping out the kid, the love interest), and they pay this off with the ending which manages to be terrible and altruistic at the same time. In Bad Teacher, Halsey just runs around the entire time being mean to everybody. Russell tries numerous times to break through to her, and it never works until the very last scene. I guess this is as good of a place as any to mention that the ending of Bad Teacher was terribly rushed.
And then there's Amy. She's obviously supposed to be the "bad guy" of the movie, as she snoops around and constantly tries to get Halsey in trouble. The problem is, Amy isn't a bad guy. Everything she does is justified in the context of the film because of what Halsey does. When Amy asks Halsey about showing movies every day in class, she's right. When she is suspicious that Halsey helped her students cheat on exams, she's right. When she accuses Halsey of doing drugs, she's right. And for all of her legitimate snooping, the film lets Amy lose her boyfriend to Halsey and take the blame for Halsey's drugs. It's supposed to be funny, but it just comes off as annoying.
There are some good parts to this movie, but I don't feel like writing very much more, so I'll just mention one. Jason Segel is hilarious here. Granted, I love him in most of the things I've seen him in, but almost every scene in the film that is actually funny involves him. His line delivery and body humor is so good. There's a scene in the gym where he's trying to impress Halsey with his strength, and his delivery gets you to believe it just enough that when he fails miserably at it, it's perfect. There are very few scenes in this film that are worth mentioning, but almost every single one of them involve Jason Segel. Having said that, this scene from the trailer where he's yelling at a kid about Lebron James is idiotic and didn't make any sense within the context of the film.
Well, I've gone way over how long a review of Bad Teacher deserves to be, so I'll wrap it up now. Bad Teacher is not a good movie, and overall it just comes off as a Bad Santa ripoff. However, if you check it out, you should at the least be entertained by Jason Segel's antics throughout the film as well as Cameron Diaz running around in Daisy Dukes.
Bad Teacher isn't really a bad movie. It's just not good, either. The film tries far too hard to be something that it isn't, and when it finally figures that out, the movie ends.
Bad Teacher is the story of Elizabeth Halsey (Diaz), a gold-digging teacher who quits her job and then gets immediately dumped by her rich fiancee. Halsey decides that getting a boob job will give her a better chance of meeting another millionaire. The problem is that she's now broke. Halsey decides to start teaching again so she can raise enough money for the surgery. Along the way she meets Amy (Punch), a teacher obsessed with being the best; Russell (Segel), a gym teacher who likes Halsey; and Scott (Timberlake), a substitute teacher whose family is wealthy. That's pretty much the entire story. I'm not complaining about it, it's just a simple story that was obviously chosen to lay jokes on top of.
It becomes very obvious very fast that the people who made Bad Teacher really want this movie to be Bad Santa, and I don't just say that because of the name. The main characters are completely unsympathetic and a douche to everyone. The problem is that Elizabeth Halsey has zero character arc in the entire film. In Bad Santa, Thornton's character was a dick, but somewhere around the one hour mark, they give you reasons to think he could be a good person (helping out the kid, the love interest), and they pay this off with the ending which manages to be terrible and altruistic at the same time. In Bad Teacher, Halsey just runs around the entire time being mean to everybody. Russell tries numerous times to break through to her, and it never works until the very last scene. I guess this is as good of a place as any to mention that the ending of Bad Teacher was terribly rushed.
And then there's Amy. She's obviously supposed to be the "bad guy" of the movie, as she snoops around and constantly tries to get Halsey in trouble. The problem is, Amy isn't a bad guy. Everything she does is justified in the context of the film because of what Halsey does. When Amy asks Halsey about showing movies every day in class, she's right. When she is suspicious that Halsey helped her students cheat on exams, she's right. When she accuses Halsey of doing drugs, she's right. And for all of her legitimate snooping, the film lets Amy lose her boyfriend to Halsey and take the blame for Halsey's drugs. It's supposed to be funny, but it just comes off as annoying.
There are some good parts to this movie, but I don't feel like writing very much more, so I'll just mention one. Jason Segel is hilarious here. Granted, I love him in most of the things I've seen him in, but almost every scene in the film that is actually funny involves him. His line delivery and body humor is so good. There's a scene in the gym where he's trying to impress Halsey with his strength, and his delivery gets you to believe it just enough that when he fails miserably at it, it's perfect. There are very few scenes in this film that are worth mentioning, but almost every single one of them involve Jason Segel. Having said that, this scene from the trailer where he's yelling at a kid about Lebron James is idiotic and didn't make any sense within the context of the film.
Well, I've gone way over how long a review of Bad Teacher deserves to be, so I'll wrap it up now. Bad Teacher is not a good movie, and overall it just comes off as a Bad Santa ripoff. However, if you check it out, you should at the least be entertained by Jason Segel's antics throughout the film as well as Cameron Diaz running around in Daisy Dukes.
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