Badness is missing.

Rating: 5/10 (3 August 2011)

I've always considered Cameron Diaz a good actress, even sometimes making average movies or accepting weak roles that never required much of her capabilities. Even though, she sporadicly make movies with quite interesting roles like: My Best Friend's Wedding (1997), Being John Malkovich (1999), Any Given Sunday (1999), Gangs Of New York (2002), The Box (2009), among others. Even in Charlie's Angels (2000) and in CA: Full Throttle (2003) she gives very funny moments.
Bad Teacher seemed to be the movie she was waiting to be able to use all her powering beauty and strong presence together with a heavy dark humor, since she already had experience characters with some dark sides but they were never entirely bad as the bad teacher seemed to be.
Well, the teacher is bad, but not heavily and totally bad, and a lot of badness is missing. She's just a bitter woman that lives an unhappy life with no money and no big tits. She isn't intelligent enough to be a teacher, but is enough to be placed as one. Some kind disappointing for those ones who expected not a very interesting plot or something like that, but at least a character that could use and abuse all the meanings of what is to be bitchy and mean. But the concept of the word may be different for the writers and also the development of the movie is quite poor. If being bad means smoking pot and sleeping during classes, pff... please, I've met worse. Maybe writers should have watched some Bette Davis classics as inspirations about what the meaning "bad" means between humans, like Of Human Bondage (1934), The Letter (1940) or The Little Foxes (1941), just as a start.
But anyway, Cameron is getting better with the age, her timing is really great, and she seems to be just having fun in this one. Lucy Punch, as Amy Squirrel, is incredibly funny and talented, and for those ones who are not familiar to her I always recommend Being Julia (2004), maybe her first major role. Justin Timberlake does his part well and also the rest of the cast, helping to save the movie from the drowning. But in the end is all about Cameron. Even the movie being weak, with a tedious plot and not even a memorable scene or great sequence, Bad Teacher is watchable just because of her presence.