Bad News Bears
Rated: PG-13
Runtime: 1 hour, 53 minutes
Directed by: Richard Linklater
Starring:
Billy Bob Thorton - Morris Buttermaker
Greg Kinnear - Roy Bullock
Sammi Kane Kraft - Amanda Whurlitzer
Jeffrey Davies - Kelly Leak
Jeffrey Tedmori - Garo Daragebrigadian
Timmy Deters - Tanner Boyle
Brandon Craggs - Mike Engelberg
Troy Gentile - Matthew Hooper
Tyler Patrick Jones - Timothy Lupus
Aman Johal - Prem Lahiri
Ridge Canipe - Toby Whitewood
Kenneth 'K.C.' Harris - Ahmad Abdul Rahim
Carlos Estrada - Miguel Agilar
Emmanuel Estrada - Jose Agilar
Marcia Gay Harden - Liz Whitewood
Paramount has abused their privilidge to remake their library and has decided to subject us to painful renditions of The Manchurian Candidate, The Stepford Wives, Alfie and they show no signs of stopping with upcoming remakes of Seconds, When Worlds Collide, The Warriors, and, hand to God, a sequel to Death Race 2000 (although that might actually be fun if Paul W.S. Anderson was only directing it instead of his usual one-two punch of solid directing of horrid writing). I suppose Paramount just draws my ire more than other studios because they think that the world could use a remake of Summer School more than an adaptation of Watchmen directed by Paul Greengrass (and Greengrass had to earn my enthusiasm as Watchmen is not just a comic but a commentary on comics as well).
So even though the past thirty years have brought us three Mighty Ducks films, Angels in the Outfield, Rookie of the Year, Little Big League and pretty much every sports film for and/or with kids, that says it's important to just have fun but make sure that the team you're following goes from terrible to great and then wins in the end. To the best of my limited knowledge, 1976's The Bad News Bears created the sports subgenre of the oddball team overcoming the odds to make it to the championship (although both the original and the remake, which I'll get to in a moment, have the team lose at the end but truly take pride in their accomplishment of their miraculous and montage-y improvment). Maybe's it's time to take the team out of retirement and make an unnecessary remake but give it an honest shot by putting in the "successful-with-School of Rock" Richard Linklater and the master of crude-yet-lovable Billy Bob Thorton and see what they can do. The result? A fine example of "not bad".
The plot is the same which is why I feel no shame in spoiling it. The only aspects they've updated are the outfits and the amount of swearing, which mostly comes from either Buttermaker (Billy Bob Thorton) or Tanner (Timmy Deters) and whenever the kids spout obscentities, it feels stitled, probably because they can't say "fuck" or anything harsh enough to earn them an "R" rating. What's silly is that you can still be obscene without cursing. Unfortunately, much like the watering-down of Buttermaker's beer in the original to a non-alcoholic beer spiked with whiskey in the remake, this movie constantly feels like a bag of pulled punches, which I suppose is better than a bag of douche (one of the film's better insults and one I hope will find more rotation in my lexicon). The film certainly does have some funny-offensive moments and the laughs are pretty frequent throughout, but the film never breaths long enough for the scenes that would make this movie more than just a nice distraction.
We never really get to know this team. They don't even get their names in the opening credits. And while the kids are certainly different, we hardly spend enough time with any to care about them. We never go further into Lupus' spaziness or Tanner's rage or even why the crippled Hooper (Troy Gentile) wanted to play baseball in the first place (other than what seemed like a funny idea to the writers at the time). While we didn't get to know every kid in School of Rock, we at least got to know four or five of them and doing so only took a few minutes of screentime with the payoff of us believing that Dewey (Jack Black) grew to like these kids instead of just trying to steal his roommate's paycheck. But the remake's Buttermaker is so mercurial and unpredictable, that his mood swings rarely seem motivated by anything other than the demands of the script rather than character development and story. In one scene he treats bad-boy Kelly (Jeffrey Davis) like crap and it's never resolved.
And while none of these faults are fatal to the film, they create a story that appears to have a lot of cut corners, even down to the casting of the acceptable Greg Kinnear as the rival, bag of douche coach when the role could have easily been played by Christopher McDonald who has upper-middle-class-ass-hole down to an art. Marcia Gay Harden seemed like she was supposed to have a character but only got about three-fifths of one instead.
What's funny is that the story sticks pretty close to the original with just a few tweaks (Buttermaker is an exterminator instead of a pool cleaner; a strip-club sponsors the team instead of a bail-bondsman) yet all of it feels like a weak imitation when it could have been superior but no one seems to really push for the hard-edge this film needs. A few extra curse words is simply the illusion of harsh and I would have gladly traded in the weak-ass "shit's" and "ass-holes" for a cut of the film that cared about having fun rather than trying to score with the audience.
Words by
Matt Goldberg
7.24.05