The
Bad News Bears was originally a terrific Walter Matthau vehicle from way back
in our nation’s bi-centennial. Some of you, I’m sure, remember the original
- not quite a classic, but a hell of a fun underdog story featuring a washed-up
old dog of an alcoholic (Matthau) who is coerced into helming a rangle gangle
group of misfits and wrong-side-of the track kids into a championship winning
ball club. I can still remember the face of the bad-boy kid and Tatum O’Neal
was fun as the fastball slinging, foul-mouthed girl. Though the original wasn’t
flawless, it was nevertheless a winning charmer that packed a good bit of shock
value, back in the days when shock value came as easily as a beer belch. It was
also successful enough to spawn three sequels.
This
new updated take of the old story must have looked pretty good on paper. You’ve
got Bill Bob Thornton who proved his worth as crass, mean-spirited somewhat lovable
loser in the hilarious Bad Santa, bring in Glenn Facarra and John Requa who penned
said Bad Santa and top it off with the king of childhood slackdom, director Richard
Linklater (Dazed and Confused) and send it up the flagpole. How can you miss.
Well they missed by a long shot and the reason can be spelled out with two letters
PG and one number 13. These digits don’t stop the adults and children from
swearing at each other like sailors, but after so many damns and hells and son
of a bitches the novelty wears off and then you’re left with another hour
and twenty minutes to kill.
With
the shock value constraints of PG-13 they completely took the bat out of Billy
Bobs hands and at that point he reminded me of another coach with a similar language
barrier in Friday Night Lights. “Let’s get out there and kick those
sons-a-guns in the backside - goshdarnit.” If you want Santa to be bad, then
you’ve got to turn loose his tongue. Without any ammunition Thornton is relegated
to try to salvage this thing amid a bunch of PG-13 swearing - swearing for the
sake of swearing with no smarts or wit or comic timing to speak of.
I
guess you can say Thornton gives it the old college try, guzzling beer, and shambling
through his haphazard has-beenhood with as much comedy as he can muster, but the
kids here are absolutely no help whatsoever. You’d think they took a list
of the “square-peg stereotypes” needed (fat kid, nerdy kid, foreign
kid, weird kid etc.) and went to some summer camp and picked them out as they
walked by. There’s not an iota of acting or comic talent to be found in the
whole lot, unless you count swearing - they can swear, but not one of them proved
able to deliver a line with any kind of know-how. Strange coming from Linklater
who has been like a one-man farm club for young talent. To be honest I don’t
know if it would have helped if these kids would have been armed with the F-bomb
- it just had doom written all over it.
Thornton’s
back story stays true to Matthau’s. He’s a career drinker, who dabbles
as a part-time exterminator (I want to say Matthau cleaned pools, but I could
be wrong) Twenty years ago he got his fifteen minutes of fame, playing in the
big show for half an inning as a Seattle Mariner, but that was his flash and his
Ball dreams never panned out after that. We never really do get a suitable explanation
as to exactly why Billy Bob takes the coaching gig, there is money involved but
if it goes any deeper than that I must have nodded off and missed it.
As
was the case in the original, Thornton manages to make winners of this loose confederation
of backward kids, mainly by prevailing upon his own estranged daughter (played
now by Sammi Kraft and then by Tatum O’Neal) who possesses a wicked pitching
arm. Also in the deal he get her hoodlum boyfriend who happens to be an ace clean-up
batter. Kraft turns out to be a bore - unable to generate any kind of fun adversarial
banter with her deadbeat dad. Anyway they wind up in the finals against the nasty
Yankees a team of hyper-competitive Hitler youth coached by a sneeringly smarmy
Greg Kinnear. Though Kinnear does little to buoy the proceedings I will say that
the film does manage to glide along somewhat amiably by virtue of it’s likable
concept, though it’s still a pretty considerable waste of time, talent and
opportunity.
The
only deviation from this fill-in-the-blanks underdog sports formula is the ending,
which of course I’m not at liberty to divulge (although it’s tempting
just to save you a few bucks). If there’s a lesson to be learned from this
film it has nothing to do with sports or sportsmanship or anything related to
the plot, the lesson is that if you’re going for shock value, you’ve
got to go for an R rating. Happily this fact is being bourne out by the success
of the Wedding Crashers and The 40 Year Old Virgin and the failure of other (PG-13)
sports flicks namely: The Longest Yard, and Kicking and Screaming. My fervent
hope is that Hollywood with it’s sudden (PG-PC- crazed marketing approach
learns from this lesson - particularly in the area of horror films.
