Bad Teacher

" Bad Teacher – Movie Review"

"As Reported by Dollyforme"

Now that summer is almost gone, its time to reflect on what movies I liked and Bad Teacher was cheaply made and poorly acted, but damn if it didn’t make me laugh.
In Bad Teacher we have Cameron Diaz disgracing the teaching profession. Bad teacher is a silly but mildly amusing comedy elevated by a sprightly cast.

Diaz performs with relish as a slutty, dope-smoking English teacher determined to bag a square but wealthy new colleague (an amusingly cast-against-type Justin Timberlake). To that end she determines to have her breasts enlarged but has a lot of saving up to do (I’m a teacher not a drug dealer), and pilfers the proceeds of an annual charity car wash.

Dumped by a fiance who has noticed that her affections lay entirely with his bank balance, she is forced back into the classroom she had just quit to begin her anticipated life of leisure. Elizabeth does not exactly hate the children in her charge: she would have to notice them first in order to do that.

All she really cares about for the first half of the film are a geeky new supply teacher Scott (Justin Timberlake), who happens to be heir to just the sort of fortune she considers her birthright, and the surgically enhanced breasts she considers essential to snaring it and him.

With $10,000 needed for the augmentation, we are thus invited to laugh at her desperate attempts to secure the cash. A saccharine colleague, Amy (English actress Lucy Punch), becomes a twee nemesis, while laconic PE teacher Russell (Jason Segel) looms lustfully in the background. The acting is uniformly on the button, but the script is patchier.
Behind the premise of an adult in a selfless profession proving to be nothing of the sort, the comedy is often more sitcom than cinema. It is funny, but never on a grand scale, and while sex, drugs and casual cruelty are omnipresent, the results are surprisingly old-fashioned - these are flimsy foundations upon which to build a new comic genre of women behaving badly.

Now it’s Britain’s Actress Lucy Punch who almost steals the show as Diaz’s keen-as-mustard colleague and love rival, while Jason Segal is endearing as a big-hearted gym teacher.

No classic here , but it’s brisk, puerile fun with added charm thanks to the game cast. A bit like watching your teachers make twits of themselves. Low budget but sometimes pretty funny – I would watch this movie again actually.