There’s a scene, about halfway through Jake Kasdan’s Bad Teacher, in which John Michael Higgins’ Principal Snur is sitting on a toilet in the gents while a fellow teacher evacuates his bowels like a percussionist on the last night of the Proms. Therein lies the problem with Bad Teacher, a film that’s far too broad to be the sly little black comedy it could have been.
The material sounds promising, with Cameron Diaz playing the carefree Elizabeth Halsey, a 7th Grade teacher in an American Middle School and who has absolutely no interest in being there. It’s somewhat refreshing, after years and years of inspiring dramas about the power a teacher can hold in the classroom and how they too can learn to grow, blah blah blah, to come across an educator who’s waiting for the school bell just so she can go out to her car a smoke a joint. After being dumped by her loaded fiancé, Halsey sets her sights on substitute and grade-A doofus Mr. Gettis (played by Diaz’s former flame Justin Timberlake in a solid, if disappointing C-grade performance), whose interest and family wealth will only be piqued by the medium of large boobs. And so, Halsey swindles and rips off everyone she can in order to gain the cup-size advantage over fellow teacher and love rival Miss Squirrel (Lucy Punch).
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| The battle for that one really twisty Twisty Fry was on |
It’s all a shame that the script doesn’t live up to its premise, as Diaz is devilishly fun as the teacher who couldn’t care less. Jason Segel is underused as a jaded gym teacher, and surely more could have been made of the class of oddballs Halsey inherits over the summer holidays. Diaz is consistent, and doesn’t go through a moralising U-turn as the film fades to black, it’s just a shame the black side of this comedy couldn’t have been more consistent too.
Could do better.
2 ½ Likes
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