Bad Teacher

Rating: Null/10 (3 November 2011)

2011 has been an above-average year for female-driven comedy, with recent films like "Bridesmaids", and "What's Your Number", proving to be the good and the bad. Today, we have "Bad Teacher", a Cameron Diaz film that falls somewhere in the middle of that spectrum.
It follows Elizabeth Halsey, a morally corrupt middle-school English teacher, whose plans to quit her day job, to be a kept woman, were derailed. She's not necessarily a bad person, in my eyes, but she really shouldn't be teaching. She drinks, smokes weed, and puts on movies for her class, on the first day of school. She plays films for her class about good teachers, like "Dead Poets Society" and "Freedom Writers", while she pours airplane bottles of vodka into her coffee mug, ignoring her students completely.
All of this is very funny to me, because this part of the movie is pretty well-conceived. Cameron Diaz gave a great performance, and proved herself to have above-average comic timing. She isn't to blame for where "Bad Teacher" went wrong. It leaves this viewer underwhelmed, at a film that should have been a lot funnier. However, it isn't necessarily a bad movie either. It's just never as funny as it should be.
Written by "The Office" alums Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, the film slightly resembles a long episode of "The Office" - something that has a brilliant concept, and the fully capable actors, however, it never really comes together in the end. However, there are a lot of reasons why this movie did work.
One being that it makes pretty good use of the time that it's given. It runs about 90 minutes, on the dot, and it feels full and decently conceived. One big reason is Cameron Diaz, proving herself not to be just a pretty face, but something of a cunning comedienne. She plays one of the most detestable characters that American cinema has recently seen, however, the audience can't help but root for her.
However, when the movie approaches moments of golden politically incorrect humor every so often, it's not what it should have been. A standard has been set for R-rated comedy films in the past few years, by films like "Knocked Up", "The Hangover" and "Bridesmaids", showing that there's a new point-of-no-return for comedy. This involves raunchy humor, yet it proves every so often, that new comedic punchlines and ideas haven't run dry.
However, "Bad Teacher" shows us nothing we haven't seen before, recycling jokes from other (and better) movies. From a lame school car- wash scene, to a borderline degrading subplot about a boob job, there isn't enough good to outweigh the bad. As I said, it has its moments, but there aren't enough of those moments to make this a great film.
Grade: B-