The thing about Elizabeth Halsey is she's not really a bad
teacher, she's just a bitch. That's her, plain and simple, without even the
slightest bit of remorse for any of her horrible antics. Take into account that
you have to sit through 92 minutes of her messed up life and what you've got is
a pretty awkward movie.
In
Bad Teacher, not only is Elizabeth a
bitch, she's superficial. When her fiance dumps her, Elizabeth decides that she
needs a breast job to land a new sugar daddy. Working as a teacher, she can't
pay the hefty price for new boobs so she has to raise money in other ways. As
she plots her twisted plans to find the cash, she also works to take down
another teacher, land the substitute, and tell other people what to do, all
while failing to teach her class anything.
What
happened in Bad Teacher was a
complete miscalculation of jokes and story line. Cameron Diaz's character was
nothing but nasty, and I couldn't have hated anyone more. On top of that, the
movie wants you to believe that the nice teacher, Amy Squirrel, is the
antagonist. Throughout it all I
mainly just felt sorry for her. Justin Timberlake and Jason Segel were mere
side notes in a film that desperately needed a likable leading character.
The
film used the encouragement of music to tell the audience how to approach a
situation, even when there was no payoff to any of the plot lines. I'm not
saying it needed to be formulaic, but it's hard to enjoy a film where the
central motivation for any character is to get a boob job and ruin everyone
else's life for their own personal gain.
The
apparent intended-to-be-funny raunchiness of Bad Teacher completely misses the mark. What you get instead is a
boring and hateful film that is never able to fully redeem itself.
