Bad News Bears
I don’t say this often, but Egad! Didn’t see this film sucking this much.
It’s like Richard Linklater and Billy Bob Thorton met up in a bar and decided they had both enjoyed their previous projects so much they wanted another chance to basically make the same movie again – and then merged the two. So we have this insipid remake of Bad News Bears, which is just Thorton in the exact same character he was in Bad Santa, an alcoholic no-luck has-been grump who finds particular delight at swearing at kids, chucked into a School of Rock rehash where baseball has been substituted for rock music.
Lightning did not strike twice for either of them here. Linklater has gathered together another assortment of cute and dorky precocious kids – there’s the angry one who swears like a trooper, the Indian computer nerd, the fat one, the disabled one…I know what you’re thinking: what a bunch of no-hopers! There’s no fucking way they will ever make a good baseball team, especially under the tutelage of a drunk who seems more intent on scoring with their mothers than scoring on the baseball field! I nearly turned it off, figuring that they would probably lose every game, the coach would get fired, etc., but just when I was reaching for a remote something magical started happening…
SPOILER WARNING BELOW
…they started winning. Unbelievable, I know. Somehow this ragtag group of pre-pubescent miscreants come good. Ducks fly together. Quack, quack.
END SPOILERS
This film would have to be aimed solely at twelve year-old boys who might get a giggle out of some of the swear words, but things are kept pretty tame and lame (especially when compared to Bad Santa) and there isn’t any ribald material to be found here that would entertain older audiences at all, unless your sense of humour is such that you find the notion of a little league team being sponsored by a strip club hilarious, or if you enjoy seeing a fat kid being called fat a whole bunch of times. Hehehhe. Fatty Fat Fat.
The only reason I kept watching this was that I was holding onto the slim chance that Linklater would subvert the whole freakin’ underdog baseball cliché somehow and surprise me, maybe by having Thorton drink himself to death Leaving Las Vegas style, but alas it was not to be so. It doesn’t quite turn all Disney at the end, but it’s close.
In the final championship game at the end there is one of the most morally confusing moments I have seen in film in a long time. Greg Kinnear plays the stereotypical win-at-all-costs coach (he is so very, very bad in this), yet there is a moment in the film where he physically assaults his son out on the pitcher’s mound because he suspected his son of throwing a pitch at a player on purpose. So there he is, shaking and pushing the boy while talking feverishly about how you “never, never try to hurt someone on the baseball field”. This moment somehow serves as the impetus for Thorton’s character to pull his socks up, and realise that baseball isn’t all about winning, so he lets the more retarded kids on his team take the field for the first time and they (SPOILER) lose the big game (END SPOILER). It’s a fucking confusing and downright stupid few minutes, but it is slightly interesting in its obtuseness, and thus possibly the highlight of this otherwise banal flick.