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Bad News Bears

2005, Movie, PG-13, 111 mins

Bad News Bears: Review

Richard Linklater's cynical kiddie-sports comedy is less a remake of THE BAD NEWS BEARS (1976) than a cover version; for all the updated riffs and personal noodling, it's best when it doesn't stray too far from the original material. Once upon a time, Morris Buttermaker (Billy Bob Thornton) was a Major League baseball player, if only for one game and not even all of that. Now he's a drunken exterminator so broke he's willing to take on coaching the Bears, a pathetic excuse for a Little League team that only exists because overbearing mom Liz Whitewood's (Marcia Gay Harden) antidiscrimination lawsuit against League officials could have stopped the entire season. Buttermaker's interest in his clumsy, bickering, foulmouthed and generally unmotivated charges, who include a fat kid (Brandon Craggs), an Asian brainiac (Aman Johal), a wispy weirdo (Tyler Patrick Jones) and an assortment of natural-born klutzes, falls somewhere between his interest in vermin and 12-step meetings. But after a humiliating rout, Buttermaker actually starts coaching — more for the sake of his own threadbare self-respect and visceral dislike of smarmy rival coach Roy Bullock (Greg Kinnear) than out of concern for the team. A man who knows his limitations, Buttermaker also does some prudent recruiting, shamelessly manipulating his ex-girlfriend's fatherless daughter (Sammi Kane Kraft) and a local skate punk (Jeffrey Davies) into lending their natural athleticism and considerable experience to the Bears' cause. But success proves as corrosive as failure, turning the merely inept Bears against their truly hopeless teammates — the paraplegic kid, for example — and undermining whatever inspirational lessons might have slipped through Buttermaker's filter of cynical self-loathing. BAD SANTA (2003) screenwriters Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, who did a nip-and-tuck (an allusion to the Atkins diet here, a trip to Hooters there) on Bill Lancaster's original script, have a keen sense of Thornton's strengths, and he delivers their scabrous and thoroughly inappropriate dialogue with a bleary, matter-of-factness that's by far the funniest thing about the film. For all its unoriginality, Linklater's BEARS still stands head-and-shoulders above third- and fourth-generation knockoffs like REBOUND and KICKING & SCREAMING (both of which opened shortly before BEARS), in which all traces of skepticism about American sports worship and its hypocritical pieties have been replaced by mushy, feel-good cliches. But it can't hold a candle to Linklater's own SCHOOL OF ROCK (2003), a variation on the theme that's as fresh and sharp as the new BEARS is slack and irrelevant. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh