Cameron Diaz, Jason Segel, and Justin Timberlake aren’t going to win any awards for Bad Teacher but it was a surprisingly fun and laugh-inducing film that wasn’t cheesy, boring or clichéd. The three actors have all done their fair share of comedic acting and this film is another notch on the belt of good but slightly higher than average scale.
The chemistry between this ensemble cast was terrific with Diaz as the horrendously “bad” teacher Elizabeth Halsey, Segel the smart-ass but endearing gym teacher Russell Gettis and Timberlake as Scott “The Substitute” Delacorte. The supporting characters of Amy Squirrel (Lucy Punch), Principal Wally Snur (John Michael Higgins), and Lynn Davies (Phyllis Smith) gave fantastic performances as the other comical teachers at John Adams Middle School.
What made this movie so enjoyable were a number of things. First to see Diaz play a gold-digging, pot-smoking, selfish, manipulative bitch in Christian Louboutin heels was just priceless because there’s something about seeing a woman behave so badly that makes you root for her even when you know you shouldn’t. Elizabeth early in the movie gets dumped by her rich fiancé and she is forced return to teaching, a job she clearly hates by letting her kids watch movies all day long while she drinks, sleeps, or reads magazines all day in class while contemplating bigger boobs. She decides to snare the new substitute Scott because she learns that he’s got family money, but in order to fully get him she decides she needs a new rack after seeing a picture of his ex-girlfriend with ginormous breasts. Elizabeth spends the rest of the film coming up with ways to make the money for her implants – embezzling, cheating, lying, manipulating and generally doing all sorts of things you would hope a teacher would never do.
"Director Jake Kasdan coaxes some laughs out of the film, but only Jason Segel, as a cynical gym teacher, seems like a real person instead of a caricature. Everyone else seems like they're trying just a touch too hard. Elizabeth Halsey (Diaz) gets dumped by the rich guy she was going to marry for money, forcing her to come back for another year of teaching junior-high English. But she is not without goals; her immediate one is to figure out how to get enough money to pay for breast implants, which she thinks will help her more easily land a replacement sugar daddy. The operation is tough to afford on a teacher's salary, of course. But one day handsome Scott Delacorte (Timberlake), the heir to a watch-making fortune, shows up as a substitute teacher, giving Elizabeth a suitable target."
"The movie, of course, belongs to Diaz. She's always projected a sort of girlfriend-gone-wild sass that suggested she's a hell of a lot of fun after a couple of mango margaritas; 'Bad Teacher' is one of the few films that's allowed her to show that. And not only does she show it, she flaunts it, from a wardrobe that's tighter than next year's school budget to a vocabulary that's definitely not on any standardized test. But she's not alone. The wonderful Lucy Punch — the gold digger from 'You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger' — is a nagging toothache as a too-perfect teacher. Comic actors such as Thomas Lennon drop by for brief but marvelous scenes, and Jason Segal is a menschy gym teacher. Justin Timberlake, however, remains too cool to really commit to his oddball character, a substitute teacher that the man-hungry Diaz fixates on."
" 'Bad Teacher' wants to be 'Bad Santa' but it's afraid to go as far as Billy Bob Thornton's gleeful middle finger to holidays and proper treatment of children. So it ends up trapped in a nowhere middle-ground, somewhere between 'Bad Santa' and the equally hilarious but family friendly Jack Black movie 'School of Rock.' Both of those movies had somewhere to go and a way to get there, but 'Bad Teacher' just goes and doesn't really seem to know where it's going. The script has its moments and the cast has a few too.
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