Mania Grade: D+

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Info:

• Starring: Cameron Diaz, Jason Segel, Lucy Punch, John Michael Higgins, Phyllis Smith, Molly Shannon and Justin Timberlake
• Written by: Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg
• Directed by: Jake Kasdan
• Studio: Sony Pictures
• Rating: R
• Run Time: 89 minutes.
• Series:

Mania Review: Bad Teacher

Bad Teacher
© Sony Pictures/Robert Trate

Comedies don’t get more one-joke than Bad Teacher: summarized in the title, indifferently embodied by Cameron Diaz, and foisted upon us in the vain hope that we might find it amusing. No such luck. You can kind of see where the filmmakers are coming from, and why they thought this might be a funny idea. Unfortunately, they didn’t develop it nearly enough to make for an acceptable movie.

Diaz plays Elizabeth, worst teacher in the whole wide world working at an amiable Illinois middle school. She shows up for work drunk, berates the cookies children bring in for her, and adopts a curriculum that consists solely of inspirational teacher movies like Stand and Deliver. Basically she’s marking time until her fiancé marries her. When he gets wise to what a horrible person she is, she’s stuck drawing a paycheck from the school until she can land another man. Along the way, she engenders a hostile rivalry with Amy Squirrel (Lucy Punch) – the “perfect” teacher across the hall – and strikes up a not-quite-romance with the school gym teacher (Jason Segel) who clearly sees more in her than we do.

That’s a big part of the problem. We don’t know why Elizabeth is such a self-serving bitch, nor do her interactions with others suggest any real human connection. They simply serve as fulcrums for the humor… which invariably consist of an endless parade of “outrageous” behavior intended to elicit gasps more than laughs. A feeble sense of development eventually asserts itself, implying that perhaps she’s not so bad after all, but Bad Teacher lacks the courage to either follow through the way it should or abandon the concept and just dive into cynicism.

Stuck in the middle as it is, it struggles to find any traction. Awful characters can make for funny subjects (see Murray, Bill), but Diaz lacks the comic timing to pull that off. It’s rather surprising really, since she’s been very good in other comedies, but in those films she often has one primary partner to play off of. Here, she has to compete with a number of different partners, including Segel, Punch and The Office’s Phyllis Smith… all of whom possess their own senses of rhythm and timing. Diaz simply can’t shift gears quickly enough to match them. Segel, in particular, handles himself quite well: bereft of apparent direction, he still scores the film’s few genuine laughs, even as he leaves his leading lady far behind.

And Elizabeth remains the film’s biggest liability. We don’t much like her and she doesn’t really make us laugh. Ostensibly, her self-serving antics illustrate how shallow and phony the rest of the school is – as exemplified by Punch’s ingratiating cheerfulness and Justin Timberlake’s wet noodle of a substitute. But director Jake Kasdan misses the mark by a staggeringly wide margin. We sympathize too much with Elizabeth’s ostensible foes and need to swallow too many genuinely ugly things she does for the equation to work.  Without more consistent laughs, the satire curdles on contact, removing the whole point of the character’s bad behavior in the first place.

Laughter, at the end of the day, is the only barometer that matters with comedies. If the jokes work, all is forgiven. If they don’t, no amount of additional enticement will work. Bad Teacher has precious few assets to begin with and rapidly squanders them amid a meandering waste of time. It’s doubly disappointing considering the director’s very reliable track record, and a premise that really deserves better.