Review: Bad News Bears

 

Snooty parent Marcia Gay Harden thinks every kid should be part of a Little League baseball team, even the athletically-challenged ones, and thus the misfit brood of the title is born. For their coach, Harden hires (read: bribes) pest exterminator Billy Bob Thornton, a former big-time (albeit very briefly) baseball player, now a surly, foul-mouthed drunk. Needless to say, with these kids, the job won’t be easy: There’s Troy Gentile as a kid in a motorised wheelchair, Timmy Deters as an aggressive, loudmouthed little runt, as well as a Poindexter East Indian, as well as Harden’s own uncoordinated son, and a character named Ahmad Abdul Rahim. Thornton’s coaching methods aren’t going to be orthodox either (he’s all for cheating), but when the number one team in the league is coached by ruthless, heartless and glib Greg Kinnear, it ain’t hard to root for Thornton and his little misfits. Sammi Kraft plays Thornton’s estranged stepdaughter, who can actually play ball pretty well. Jeff Davies is the expected ‘ringer’, a loner rebel with a surprising amount of aptitude for the game.

 

Pretty much “Bad Coach” (as in “Bad Santa”), rather than a remake of the much-loved Walter Matthau movie this 2005 sports comedy from a slumming Richard Linklater (“Before Sunrise”, “Dazed and Confused”) manages to surprisingly entertain thanks to that crude, subversive edge I alluded to earlier (wait ‘till you hear who the team’s sponsor is!). Matthau’s coach was merely a foul-mouthed drunk. Here, Thornton gets the foul-mouthed and drunk part down easily but what is really shocking (and really quite funny) is that a lot of what his character says (and not just to the kids) isn’t just crude, it’s wholly inappropriate, over their heads, and frankly, sometimes just weird. His likening baseball to a ‘German chick’ is too hilarious for me to dare spoil here, and there’s a classic line about Hitler too. It’s not brilliant – Marcia Gay Harden is appallingly wasted and the plotting is generally clunky and awkward. It’s not original – after all, it’s just a remake- pretty faithful too. However, it’s funny – possibly more than the original – and a helluva lot better than it should be. Still, just what is Richard Linklater doing here? At least this film is a vast improvement over his previous lukewarm effort “School of Rock”, which wasn’t funny in the least. Scripted by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, from the original Bill Lancaster screenplay which spawned seemingly hundreds of kids sports films. This one’s actually pretty fun. I was surprised.

 

Rating: B-