| BAD NEWS BEARS |
 2005 - USADirector: Richard Linklater
- Reviewed by Vickie
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. [Read Jennifer's positive review of this very same movie!] |
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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.