Bad News Bears film review

certificate_12A

BAD NEWS BEARS

Bad News Bears and Bad Santa have more in common than the first word of their titles. Both films star Billy Bob Thornton as a sullen souse with a caustic wit. They also share the same writers in John Requa and Glen Ficarra, which explains the similarities. Although Bad News Bears is a remake of the 1976 comedy starring Walter Matthau, it has much in common with the 2003 anti-Christmas romp in which Thornton played the safe-cracking Santa.

In Bad News Bears Thornton plays one-time professional baseball player Morris Buttermaker who has been reduced to coaching a wretched kids baseball team. His insensitive methods, which generally consist of insulting his young charges - "You guys look like the last shit I took" - while amusing, lacks the freshness it enjoyed when Thornton struck that tone first time around. Bad News Bears is essentially a one gag movie, but when you have Thornton wearing a t-shirt with the slogan 'She looked good last night' and clutching a beer while chastising his hapless team, "You boys swing like Helen Keller at a piñata party," it's a pretty funny joke.

With all the emphasis placed squarely on Thornton's shoulders, there is little left for the more than capable supporting cast, headed up by the Oscar winning Marcia Gay Harden and the Academy Award nominated Greg Kinnear, to do. Indeed, the film's major flaw is that it bothers little with anything other than providing a set up for one of Buttermaker's withering snipes. There is no attempt to focus on the lives of the kids, as was the case with Thornton's last film, Friday Night Lights, in which he played a high school football coach. Here the team is handpicked solely for their potential as the butt of jokes. It's why it consists of the obligatory fatty, the geek, the troublemaker and the kid with the unpronounceable name. There's even a quadriplegic to insure the level of humour rarely evolves beyond base as typified by Buttermaker's reference to his multiracial team as the "damn League of Nations."