New 'Bad News Bears' whiffs , but bawdy Billy Bob makes contact
Billy Bob Thornton knows raunch. It oozes from his pores and erupts from his potty mouth. Not since Robert Mitchum has an actor worn lewdness like cologne. Thornton, the nation's Id Boy, fairly reeks of the sack and the sauce.Now, I don't much care for Bad News Bears, a relatively faithful update of the 1976 film where beer-guzzling Walter Matthau coaches a Little League team of misfits who swear like stevedores. But Thornton! Oh my badness! He swills the Matthau role with the unslakable thirst of W.C. Fields and idiosyncratic sexuality of Johnny Depp. So this is what Bad Santa does during the off-season.
Billy Bob Thornton knows raunch. It oozes from his pores and erupts from his potty mouth. Not since Robert Mitchum has an actor worn lewdness like cologne. Thornton, the nation's Id Boy, fairly reeks of the sack and the sauce.
Now, I don't much care for Bad News Bears, a relatively faithful update of the 1976 film where beer-guzzling Walter Matthau coaches a Little League team of misfits who swear like stevedores. But Thornton! Oh my badness! He swills the Matthau role with the unslakable thirst of W.C. Fields and idiosyncratic sexuality of Johnny Depp. So this is what Bad Santa does during the off-season.
Curiously, Thornton's subversive performance as the type of guy parents warn their kids to stay away from is in this PG-13 movie a tad too profane for the preteens who would really dig it and too juvenile for most adults.
Who, then, is the audience? Teenagers and their parents who might be amused at how the film from Richard Linklater (School of Rock) takes aim at all-American hypocrisy and political correctness. The type that preaches "it doesn't matter whether you win or lose but how you play the game," but practices ruthless competition (personified by smiling cobra Greg Kinnear), is the villain here. As are the litigious parents (embodied by Marcia Gay Harden) who sue the city to win their special-needs kids a spot on the Little League roster and then fail to come to the games.
As Morris Buttermaker, an exterminator who looks as if he's been huffing fumigant, Thornton is the heretic who makes piety look sham. He may be shaggy, but he's no hypocrite. Listen to him instill team spirit into his 12-year-old charges: "Baseball's hard. You can love it, but it doesn't always love you back - kinda like a German chick."
This is pretty typical of Bad News Bears rewriters (and Bad Santa screenwriters) Glenn Ficarra and John Requa: FDOTFL (fall-down-on-the-floor-laughing) for adults of a certain warp; IDGI (I don't get it) for everyone else.
Buttermaker, a guy more usually found pacifying frisky rats and friskier Hooters girls, has accepted the gig as coach because once upon a time he played (two-thirds of an inning) in the majors.
As he did in School of Rock, Linklater infuses Bears with the belief that it takes a misfit to teach a misfit.
With two exceptions, the younger actors here seem cowed by Thornton. Though she's no Tatum O'Neal (who held her own against Matthau in the original), Sammi Kane Kraft has a scorching fastball as Bears pitcher Amanda Whurlitzer, daughter of a Buttermaker ex. And Jeffrey Davies exudes heartthrob appeal as Kelly Leak, a Sk8er Boi with a bad attitude and a great batting average.
Contact movie critic Carrie Rickey
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Bad News Bears
** (out of four stars)
Produced by J. Geyer Kosinski and Richard Linklater, directed by Linklater, written by Bill Lancaster, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, based on the 1976 film by Lancaster, photography by Rogier Stoffers, music by Ed Shearmur, distributed by Paramount Pictures.
Running time: 1 hour 54 mins.
Buttermaker. . . Billy Bob Thornton
Bullock. . . Greg Kinnear
Liz Whitewood. . . Marcia Gay Harden
Amanda. . . Sammi Kane Kraft
Kelly. . . Jeffrey Davies
Parent's guide: PG-13 (profanity, sexually explicit language, rude behavior)
Playing at: area theaters