Bad News Bears

July 25, 2005

Rated: PG-13 Runtime: 111 min Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

I don’t so much mind sitting through a bad flick when the people that made it were really trying to make something good and just missed the mark. What I absolutely have no patience for, however, is a movie made by people who were just going through the motions. Bad News Bears isn’t even THAT good, I’m sorry to say.

Bad News Bears I actually had reasonably high hopes going into this one given that it had Billy Bob (Thornton, that is; not our Billy Bob) and the writing team from Bad Santa. I suppose I should have known better. The movie starts off well enough and there are a couple of cheap laughs early on. But soon after, the movie goes on autopilot and the cast starts sleep-walking towards their paychecks. The casting is very suspect. Sammi Kraft and Jeff Davies, for instance, reprise the roles of Billy Bob’s daughter and bad boy Kelly Leak (played by Tatum O’Neal and Jackie Earle Haley in the original 1976 version). Neither has any prior acting experience and both pretty much just suck their first time out.

Timmy Deters, as Tanner Boyle, isn’t much better. The female lead of the movie is played by Marcia Gay Harden and I think they wanted her to be somewhat of a sex object but…that just wasn’t working. Casting Billy Bob as Morris Buttermaker was a pretty good move, but his talents were pretty much wasted.

The writing and direction were as bad or worse than the casting. The interaction of the players, on the field and off, was disjointed and did NOTHING to make you want to pull for them to win. Also, the raunchy jokes I had expected to carry over from Bad Santa were nowhere to be found. Dammit. And as if all this wasn’t bad enough, everyone on the screen just looked as if they couldn’t wait for their scenes to be in the can so they could get the heck off the set.

Normally I might warn a person off a movie by advising them not to bother seeing it in the theater. In this case, however, I’ll just advise you not to bother seeing this one…at all.

Posted by Alex | Filed Under 1 Stars, Billy Bob Thornton, Comedy, Greg Kinnear, Marcia Gay Harden, PG-13, Theatrical