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PLOT: A pack of misfit kids get a low-life loser coach for their baseball team. But as cooperation and understanding blossom, everyone begins to improve in the game of baseball and the game of li... Hey! Wait a minute! Didn't we already see this movie with Martin Lawrence and then before that will Will Ferrell? Dammit.
More of the same, only more so -- that's the Bad News Bears for anyone who has already seen Kicking And Screaming or Rebound this summer.
How many movies about outcast kids and cast-off coaches can one industry support?
Don't answer that.
Assuming you haven't seen any other movies about lousy sports teams with pathetic coaches, or even the original version of The Bad News Bears from 1976, then let us tell you with great enthusiasm that this Bad News Bears remake is a comedy about misfit kids who get a terrible baseball coach and yet all involved benefit from the association, begin to play better ball games and live happily ever after -- an amazing plot twist, we must say.
The original Bad News Bears starred the inimitable Walter Matthau and featured small children cursing like stevedores. Thirty years ago this was considered unusual and very funny.
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These days, when your average kindergarten pupil routinely asks one to pass the f-----g butter, all the cursing bits in the new Bad News Bears seem fairly tame.
But this version of the movie has a secret weapon: Billy Bob Thornton, poster boy for trailer trash.
His behaviour will make you smile. The idea seems to have been to grab Thornton for this project while his insane turn in Bad Santa was still fresh in the minds of movie-goers.
Thornton plays coach Buttermaker, a washed-up ball player long past his glory days. Drunk and rude at the best of times, Buttermaker works as an exterminator (lots of dead-rat visual jokes) and has to be bribed to coach a baseball team that involves a passel of nerds and deliquents.
(Hollywood's idea of loser children, by the way, includes immigrants, the unathletic, a handicapped boy, an overweight child and a girl. One of the film's writers, Glenn Ficarra, notes that the boy in the wheelchair was added to the story, "To reflect this PC 'every kid can play' mentality." PC? Glenn, honey -- you better hope the guys in Murderball never see your movie or get your home address.)
Anyway, the kids who want to play ball have little athletic talent. Some love to curse and fight. One was in juvenile lock-up, etc. Thornton's character doesn't do much to change things, but he cleverly gets a terrific girl pitcher (Sammi Kane Kraft) and a superb player (Jeff Davies) on his team, and the Bears begin to win. Self-esteem improvement all around! Sport as a metaphor for American life!
You can write the rest yourself.
Greg Kinnear shows up in Bad News Bears as the pompous coach of a winning team. Marcia Gay Harden appears as the lawyer mom who originally bribes Buttermaker to coach her son's team.
The Bad News Bears is not risque at all, but it's often cute and has a handful of laughs, and that's about it. Not every film can be a winner, you know, but it still takes 12 to make a team and there's no 'i' in movie.
Something like that, anyway.
(This film is rated PG)