Bad Teacher

If it's good to be bad, then Cameron Diaz didn't get the memo. Neither did the Bad Teacher star's director Jake Kasdan or screenwriters Gene Stupnitsky or Lee Eisenberg. Hell, I don't think the guy holding the boom in any given scene caught the message. How else can the makers of a supposed dark comedy about a nasty, vain teacher (Diaz) justify such incredibly unfunny drivel? So maybe it isn't good to be bad. Or maybe I'm just missing the point. Whatever the explanation, Bad Teacher's many attempts at comedy resulted in many muted expressions from me, a chuckle or laugh or anything related too stubborn to escape my lips.

And the concept held such promise! A dark, devious comedy featuring a woman as the foul-mouthed antihero sounds like a fun place to start. When you toss in the school setting, golden opportunities for skewering the education system and satirizing the school experience quickly appear. Schools have been hilariously explored with a dangerously acid wit in previous female-led movies like Heathers and Election, so the formula is at least proven to work. That doesn't mean it's guaranteed to work, of course, but Bad Teacher certainly finds itself in good company for its concept alone.

So perhaps Stupnitsky and Eisenberg looked at past school-set dark comedies and figured this stuff just writes itself. Because there's nothing funny or smart or insightful or interesting in Bad Teacher. Scenes of Diaz interacting with her roommate at home feel like they're improvised, poorly, so perhaps the script was written with a number two pencil and chunks of it kept getting erased at the last second. That might explain why scenes that are clearly intended to be humorous just hang limp as the actors wait it out, trying to remember how to be funny.

Too often do a few actors stand in front of the camera and attempt to will a joke into existence. It doesn't work. Occasionally, some dialogue sounds like a joke or a gesture reminds of a joke, but that's the closest this flick comes to connecting the comedic dots. It's pathetic to watch after a while, because there's so little effort put into each scene. It's like the movie hates itself and can't wait to get to the next bit, hoping (like me) that maybe it gets a bit better later on.

Well, it doesn't. And while it's obvious from the start that there's something off, it's still frustrating to see an entire movie fail so lamely to achieve its goal. There's not even a fun observation of education or school survival buried in here. Since the jokes fall so flat so consistently, it isn't exactly surprising that the movie has nothing interesting to say, but there's such potential here that the lack of something (anything!) refreshing registers as yet another frustration.

When self-absorbed Elizabeth (Diaz) turns to inspirational teacher movies to do the classroom teaching for her, there's the opportunity for some satirical fun. But Stupnitsky and Eisenberg and Kasdan and Diaz fail to massage this idea into an insightful commentary on the clichéd lens through which many education-based movies view the school experience. So the joke is wasted. Simply acknowledging that these movies exist and that Elizabeth's teaching methods go against the grain does not magically provide a reason to laugh.

Even the juxtaposition of good teachers from movies and bad teachers from movies is completely wasted. Obviously, Elizabeth is a terrible educator and Edward James Olmos in Stand and Deliver or Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds are good ones (at least, cinematically speaking). So why not take a trip into spoof territory and make fun of those movies? Or at least play with the potential parallels? Simply playing "Gangsta's Paradise" over one scene isn't going to cut it. And so these scenes of Elizabeth burying her head while her kids watch supposedly inspirational movies are nothing but half-formed gags, lazy attempts at potential reduced to nothing more than filler.

Eventually, Elizabeth changes her teaching tune when she learns that a hefty cash bonus will be awarded to the teacher whose class achieves the best results by the end of the year. Elizabeth wants the money to help pay for her planned boob job (yup, that's her motivation), so she begins following the syllabus and actually attempts to teach. This change basically means we're subjected to a collection of montages (ripe for parody, but that would require effort) and mostly just more of the same crap that came before. Elizabeth is a woman on a mission now, but that doesn't mean she's any funnier or more interesting than she was earlier.

Since the jokes are so clearly absent or underwritten or awkwardly conceived, it's easy to hoist most of the blame on the writers. And Stupnitsky and Eisenberg certainly deserve it. But at the same time, Kasdan's direction stinks, the editing is atrocious, and the supporting cast is weak. Only Lucy Punch, stuck in something resembling a villainous role, is somewhat enjoyable to watch, even if her character arc is annoying. Punch is a talented actor and she does her best to carve out a decent onscreen identity, but it still doesn't add up to much. Co-stars Justin Timberlake and Jason Segal are mostly just boring. They have specific roles to play in this cookie-cutter narrative and neither actor is interested in attempting anything unique. Timberlake's character is especially useless.

At the centre of it all is Diaz, whose comic timing is as ugly as her character's teaching skills. She brings a lot of energy to the role and seems to relish all the nasty barbs she hurls at those around her, but Diaz simply isn't funny. It's an incredibly flat, one-note performance and that single note isn't particularly engaging. She needs to carry the movie and she never comes close to pulling off such a weighty task. She's believably vain in the role, so I'll give her points for that, but there's no excuse for how terrible her timing is. There are many things wrong with Bad Teacher, but its failure is not complicated. It's a comedy. It's not funny. It's that simple. Not much of a lesson there, even for a movie as bad as this one.