Bad Teacher is a hit and miss comedy, with a fair number of laughs, but a fair number of plot holes and questions. Before I even thought about this movie after seeing it, I went and watched Bad Santa for the first time. Both films have a similar premise with the lead character being unpleasant and offensive. But Bad Santa was written with a more style of dark comedy, and let's not forget, with a corrupt childhood and a "whatever" attitude, Billy Bob Thornton's character had a perfectly good reason to be "bad" and mean. Cameron Diaz has none other than she is just mean-spirited and has chosen to pursue a miserable lifestyle.
Elizabeth Halsey is our main character, portrayed by the lovely Cameron Diaz. Elizabeth is a teacher had a normal school, and comes home one day to her fiancée and finds out that his mother has convinced him to call of the wedding. Planning to possibly spend the rest of her life staying at home since her fiancée was rich, Elizabeth must return to the school where she shows her class movies every day while she naps at her desk.
Seeing the attractive substitute teacher Scott Delacorte (Timberlake), Elizabeth makes conversation to learn he has just gone through a breakup with a woman with large breasts. Elizabeth decides to under-go a breast enlargement surgery, a costly but rewarding surgery, to be more self-appreciative.
The main rival in the film is Amy Squirrel (Punch), another teacher in the building. She believes that Elizabeth is a fraud, scamming the school out of money (to pay for her surgery). There is also a strange attraction between Jason Segel's character as the gym teacher. The movie's biggest fault is it focuses more on Elizabeth's sometimes funny, sometimes not antics instead of building up the attraction it should with Jason Segel's character. When the film ends, we feel that the film itself didn't know how to end and just thought up something out of the blue just to give the film some sort of sun-shiny ending. The end would've been better, if we got more of a relationship between the two.
Another problem is that the students are never developed enough. The film has several students that speak to Miss Halsey individually, but it seems it can't make up its mind which one it wants to focus on. We have the brown nose girl and the sensitive kid who writes poetry and is crushing on the girl way out of his league. We get brief scenes with them, but we never see Elizabeth talk to one of the students very much. In Bad Santa, Thornton was always talking to kids and, despite his sour motivation, he was optimistic about the loner he picked up along the way.
The backstory isn't big either. If Cameron Diaz is such a miserable hack behind the desk, why did she take up teaching in the first place? How did she become a teacher? Does the principal never come in the classroom to find that Elizabeth is sleeping while the kids watch Scream? While I liked Diaz in There's Something About Mary and other things she has done, in this, she is just barely likable.
The jokes are funny. But boy does the writing fail it. When the jokes are funny, they are really funny. When the jokes fail, they fall flat on their face and are cringe inducing. The dry humping scene between Diaz and Timberlake is awkward, and is useless. It doesn't cause any advance in the plot or accomplishment among Diaz's part. It's simply there to have some sort of sex scene in a movie titled Bad Teacher.
Bad Teacher is cute, but ultimately not as dirty or as funny as it should be. The relationship between the characters is forced, no one on screen seems to be doing their best, and the screenplay, like I said, can be good but can really bad. A comedy that had potential, also had a really good movie it would be compared to for its lifetime. The result; Santa will live on while the Teacher will need an attitude adjustment.
Starring: Cameron Diaz, Jason Segel, and Justin Timberlake. Directed by: Jake Kasdan.
