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Bad Teacher

On top of not being a fan of movies that surround kids with profanity and sexuality, I didn’t like this for more fundamental reasons.

Premise

That Diaz got away with her antics all year long was a suspension of disbelief too great to overlook. Yes, the movie obviously made this a part of the story- the rival teacher who tried to squeal on her, the scene where the principal spoke with Diaz about showing movies, etc.- but the worse she was as a teacher, the harder it was to accept that no one realized it or said anything, namely the students.

I don’t feel this is nitpicking. The story of a bad teacher did have a chance at succeeding, just not with such a foundation. Look at a similar situation, School of Rock, where Jack Black also had to avoid getting caught. The differences are that his students liked the music project, were at least getting something positive out of it, the time frame was shorter (one semester), and he eventually got caught.

Character

It’s almost impossible to empathize with characters whose objective is selfish, twisted or simply wrong. Here, the thread on which all of Cameron Diaz’s antics rested was her desire to raise money to get fake breasts thinking that would be the way for her to become a rich guy’s trophy wife. That it was Cameron Diaz playing the role was not enough to make me care about such a person!

Let’s look at other movies that did succeed with similar angles and see what the differences were.

My Best Friend’s Wedding. Julia Roberts tried to break up her best friend’s wedding in order for her to be with the guy. That’s truly bad, and she expressed her reservations throughout the movie. That it was the lovely Julia Roberts was not enough to make this work, it was because many people related to the core idea of wanting to break up a relationship because they felt the guy/girl was better off with them.

Midnight Run. The accountant, The Duke, skimmed money from a gangster who in the backstory ruined Robert DeNiro’s life. DeNiro then took The Duke across country to place him in custody of the bail bondsman. That’s bad, we figured he’d thank The Duke for trying to stick it to the gangster. But the difference here is that we only learned of the connection to the gangster late in Act II. Really, DeNiro’s objective was to bring in The Duke in order to raise enough money to quit the business.

Most gangster movies. It’s either cathartic to root for a criminal because many people fantasize about the kind of life where they don’t follow the rules of civilization, or they relate to the criminal as an outsider/misfit and something humane in him, like a quest for justice, raising money for a loved one, etc.

Also, Diaz didn’t really have an arc. She started as a bad teacher and ended that way. The personal aspect of allowing herself to fall for the phys-ed teacher Jason Segal was only part of an arc.

Perhaps I also felt a disconnect considering she was a teacher. Yes, it was a comedy, but look at Bad Santa, a movie where Billy Bob Thornton had a similar character as Diaz’s. Everyone knows Santa is fake and many people feel it’s silly the way that tradition is revered. So that makes it ripe for satire and even mockery. But teaching? Adults know the value of educators and, when kids make fun of teachers, it’s not by imagining them as Diaz’s character. Even in the movie, her students were aloof or questioned her, they didn’t become fond of her because of her laxness.

Character

I like Justin Timberlake as an actor, but his character here was too weird and inconsistent. At first he had zero reaction to Cameron Diaz’s looks, then near the end when he was in love with the rival teacher he dry-humped Diaz. Where did that come from? And the dry-humping was silly, not funny.

Considering Diaz was chasing him and considering the amount of screen time he had, his Bellamy character needed to be three-dimensional and not a caricature.

Structure/Plot

Diaz getting dumped at the beginning of the story did not connect to her bad teaching ways. I thought that was weird. It could have been that she was an average teacher to begin with, doing her job as a job and not really connecting with the kids, and then the sadness of the break-up caused her to not care at all about teaching.

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