While it’s easy enough to criticize director Jake Kasdan’s Bad Teacher for its brainless slapstick humor, what more can you expect from the same director that brought you Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story starring John C. Reilly? Go prepared for inappropriate jokes and maybe a couple of dead brain cells and you’ll be fine and perhaps even surprised by the hilarious supporting characters in the film.
Elizabeth (Cameron Diaz) is a rude, heartless, materialistic blonde bombshell who is, unsurprisingly, also a bad teacher at the John Adams Middle School in Illinois, USA. She is counting the days until she marries her super rich fiancé and quits her teaching gig. However, the day after she quits her job, her fiancé breaks up with her, accusing her of being a gold digger. She is kicked to the curb and forced to take back the job she loathes and room-share with some guy on Craigslist. Eager to get out of her mess, she comes to the conclusion that saving up ten grand and buying a pair of fake tits will get her hitched to another rich guy. Shortly after, an extremely loaded and handsome but painfully dorky Scott Delacorte (Justin Timberlake) becomes a substitute teacher in the school and she plots to seduce him. There’s one problem: Scott likes the equally lame Amy Squirrel (Lucy Punch).
If you can look past the blatant blonde stereotypes that pretty much make up Elizabeth’s character, a predicable plot that lacks any sort of depth and vulgar jokes that earn only cheap laughs, then this is the movie for you. The film’s saving graces, though, are its clever static characters like dolphin-obsessed Principal Wally Snur (John Michael Higgins), and The Office’s Phyllis Smith who plays Elizabeth’s totally awkward brownnoser and only ally besides Russel Gettis (Jason Segel), a stoner gym teacher that has a mega crush on her.
Call it a guilty pleasure, but who cares? This movie doesn’t. It doesn’t try hard. It knows what it is. And every movie that you watch this summer doesn’t have to take you through an epic mind journey. We’d give this film a 2.51 if we could, so it could squeak by with a D-, but since at BK we only give full letter grades, we will round down.