BAD NEWS BEARS (2005)
Written by Jennifer
April 01, 2009
| Genre | Comedy |
| Year | 2005 |
| Country | USA |
| Director | Richard Linklater
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| Actors | Billy Bob Thornton, Greg Kinnear, Marcia Gay Harden, Sammi Kraft, Ridge Canipe, Brandon Craggs, Jeff Davies, Timmy Deters |
| MPAA Rating | PG-13 |
I'm not even taking one for the team—I'm taking one for Billy Bob Thornton himself.I don't know why I'm doing this. I'm not even taking one for the team—I'm taking one for Billy Bob Thornton himself. Do you hear me, Billy Bob? I'm doing this for you, because I think your version of The Bad News Bears deserves a chance. It's an underdog of a movie that makes people want to spit and throw hot dogs, but I liked it, and maybe someone else will too. I brought The Bad News Bears home over Christmas with no preconceived notions. I thought it looked okay, I usually enjoy Billy Bob, and so I popped it into the VCR. I spent the next two hours generally smiling and having a great time, completely unaware of my deplorable taste in movies. It wasn't until I got back to work and someone said, "Did you see The Bad News Bears?" that it became clear. I smiled cluelessly and said, "Yeah! Wasn't it great?" and she wrinkled her nose and said, "Oh god, I hated it." I think the love it or hate it reaction has a lot to do with the original movie. Fans of the original are not digging the Billy Bob version, but my only memory of the first movie is disappointment. I remember waiting all day for it to be on TV one Sunday, and when it came on, it was just a bunch of boring baseball. I suspect all the good bits had been edited out, and it was an all around let down. My enjoyment of Billy Bob's Bears amounts to this: swearing is fun. I confess—I was thoroughly entertained by Billy Bob's lazy, apathetic Coach Buttermaker and his team of potty-mouthed little leaguers. "Why would a guy like that even be a coach?" I wondered, but I guess that's just what former pros do with their interminable retirement years. Billy Bob is surprisingly endearing as a complete shitbag. He sort of does the Bad Santa thing, where he just drinks and delivers one liners in a deadpan voice, yet there's something likable about him. Some part of him knows he's a failure, but doing better still eludes him. In any case, I enjoyed watching the team's rather pointless struggle to almost success. I loved it when Billy Bob makes fun of rival coach Greg Kinnear's too-tight shorts... something about not wanting to see his grapes? The movie is full of did-I-really-just-hear-that? lines, and despite making a minimum of sense, it's great fun for anyone who has a teenage boy with no standards lurking in their soul.
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Tanner. Ogilvie. Engleberg. Ahmad. Lupus. Kelly Leak. Buttermaker. Names that were forever engrained in my memory as a child, thanks to the Bad News Bears trilogy of films. I looooved those movies. Loved them. Watched them repeatedly. And, even now as an adult, those guys hold a soft spot in my heart.
Sadly, the cast of this highly forgettable and somewhat sacrilegious remake won’t need to squeeze in there anytime soon.
Why, oh why, director Richard Linklater – who helmed two of my all-time favorite movies, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset -- ever decided to sign on for this mess is a mystery, but he nonetheless calls the shots for the story of lazy, drunken, has-been Morris Buttermaker (Billy Bob Thornton, doing a comparatively mildler version of his Bad Santa alter ego), who very reluctantly agrees to coach a Little League baseball team. The “players” are a rag-tag group of talentless misfits played by supremely wooden young actors, who don’t hold a candle to the originals, I’m afraid.
Throwing a wrench into their already-problematic proceedings is a smarmy rival coach (Greg Kinnear), one of those testosterone-charged alpha males who doesn’t know how win or lose gracefully. Naturally, the sad-sack Bears players slowly morph into good players under Buttermaker’s questionable coaching, and it’s not long before rivalries come to a head en route to the League championships.
Aside from the fact that I don’t see a point in remaking a film like Bears in the first place, my main issue with this incarnation is the casting. It’s awful! From pugilistic moppet Tanner (Timmy Deters) to greasy rebel Kelly Leak (Jeffrey Davies) to the team’s only girl (Sammi Kane Kraft), they all look and sound like they’re reading their dialogue. And badly. They’re more believable and skilled on the field (many have baseball backgrounds), but acting? Not so much. The casting directors missed the mark, in my opinion, going for look-alikes rather than kids who can perform convincingly. By comparison, the cast of the original were great – Chris Barnes’ Tanner was angry but lovable; Quinn Smith’s Timmy Lupus was heartbreakingly meek (unlike this film, where Lupus seems to be portrayed as an overmedicated freak); Tatum O’Neal had a freakin’ Oscar, already!; and, sure, Jackie Earle Haley as Kelly wasn’t exactly pin-up material, but he had an intense screen presence that is sorely, SORELY, lacking in that character this time around.
The “jokes” are leaden, and the laughter was, at best, sporadic in the screening I attended. While the original featured dialogue that would raise eyebrows by today’s standards, the remake tries very hard to be controversial while still remaining within the boundaries of the politically correct. The result? Why bother. Like the acting, it feels forced.
Credit does go to the grown-ups, though. Thornton is appropriately slimy with an underlying warmth and odd charm, Kinnear does a decent Golden Boy Gone Awry and Marcia Gay Harden is, as ever, wonderful as a Stepford-like mom who’s more concerned with her hobbies than her son. (Were it not for her, I don’t think I would have laughed once.)
Overall, a big “no thanks” to this one. And a huge plea to Hollywood that they immediately scrap any plans, no matter how flimsy, to remake any of the sequels. If I see Bad News Bears in Breaking Training coming soon to a theater near me, it had better be a rerelease of the original.
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