“Bad Teacher”: Cameron Diaz’s raunchy misfire

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 20:12:00 +0000

"Bad Teacher" keeps threatening to become entertaining without quite getting there, but it took me a while to realize how truly awful it is. This wannabe-outrageous comedy directed by Jake Kasdan (mostly a TV guy, and also the son of "Big Chill" director Lawrence Kasdan) features an enthusiastic but directionless star performance by Cameron Diaz, who does her best to cover up the inanity of the entire project by blanketing the movie with pep and pulchritude, like a leggy ICBM dropping little nuclear warheads all over the landscape. They don't go off. It's got the wonderful English actress Lucy Punch, trying to rescue her screamingly dreadful role as a perky, New Agey social-studies teacher named Amy Squirrel, who becomes the deadly rival of Diaz's foul-mouthed and venal Elizabeth Halsey. It's got Justin Timberlake in big glasses and preppy clothes, who looks dazed in the headlights while playing a dorky, possibly gay-inflected character meant to poke fun at his own image. It's all just an embarrassment, the kind of pointless slog you'll encounter on Netflix in two years and wonder, How the hell did that get made? At one point I tried to make myself laugh at a scene that features an Abe Lincoln impersonator starting to do the "churn butter" dance.

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“Bad Teacher”: Cameron Diaz’s raunchy misfire