Only proves how good Bad Santa was in the first place

Rating: 4/10 (29 June 2011)

What is wrong with people in Hollywood? I don't mean the drugs and the egomania and the somewhat questionable sexual practices. I mean how do people who make a living telling stories to human beings consistently show such poor understanding of the intersection of storytelling and human behavior? Bad Teacher is another in a long line of movies that feels like it was written by some COBOL-based computer program and filmed by the stand it for the robot from Short Circuit. It has no idea what makes characters interesting or how to present them to the audience in an engaging or sympathetic manner. All this thing does is cycle through a bunch of superficial stuff cribbed from other films while a few random jokes get shoved in with all the subtlety of a proctologist with that disease that turns your hands into lobster claws.
Elizabeth Halsey (Cameron Diaz) is an inwardly grotesque and outwardly past-her-prime woman who gets dumped by her rich fiancée and is stuck teaching middle school. The plot parades through a series of situations we've all seen before, though with the twist of having them unfold from the perspective of the character who would normally be the villain. There's Elizabeth and the hapless wallflower co-worker, a feud with the sunny-faced teacher across the hall, the rich guy Elizabeth vainly pursues and the other guy that's obviously the one who's right for her. Throw in the old "big test coming up that the students have to pass" and an unfunny mixture of Bill Murray from Meatballs and Walter Matthau from The Bad News Bears and that's this motion picture.
The obvious comparison of Bad Teacher is with Bad Santa. The comparison, unfortunately, is that the latter is an hilarious dark comedy and the former is prefabricated dreck that's about as funny as a tax audit. That's because the folks who made Bad Santa understand how people think and feel and respond. The makers of Bad Teacher understand people about as well as a Lyme disease-carrying tick.
The stark distinction is nowhere clearer than between Billy Bob Thornton's Willie and Diaz' Elizabeth. Willie, the titular Bad Santa, is a catastrophically awful person. He's a degenerate alcoholic, consumed by self-loathing and possessing zero self-control, who is rude and mean to everyone in his vicinity. But what allows people to care what happens to Willie is that his problems are produced by his own dysfunction and as much misery as he inflicts on others, he attracts even more to himself. Willie is damaged, he knows he's damaged and the whole film is about Willie trying to escape the prison of his own flaws.
Conversely, Elizabeth is a narcissistic bitch and that's all. She doesn't have any profound personal weaknesses. She does bad things to others without ever really suffering herself. She never truly acknowledges or repents of either her miserable personality or baser instincts. There's nothing about the character for the viewer to latch onto and nothing that would ever make anyone root for her. She starts and ends the movie as an utterly unlikable hag who still gets a happy ending, while Willie struggles to become a hero only to wind up in the hospital after being shot multiple times by the cops.
That emotional and dramatic illogic extends through almost all of Bad Teacher. Take the main characters' love interests in both films. Willie is pursued by Sue (Lauren Graham), a Jewish girl with a Santa fetish. Elizabeth is pursued by Russell (Jason Segel), a gym teacher who has no reason to be interested in Elizabeth except to try and screw her. But while Willie welcomes Sue's advances, and any pathetic drunk would with a woman who looks like the smokin' hot Lauren Graham, Elizabeth is constantly rejecting Russell in frequently blunt and caustic fashion. Even though she has no attractive qualities other than being good looking, and Diaz stopped being insanely beautiful a few movies ago, Russell continues to throw himself at Elizabeth no matter how many terrible things she does to him or others. One of these relationships makes sense within the context of its story and is even charming in a rolling-around-in-the-gutter way. The other makes no sense except as the product of the Almighty Plot Hammer.
Bad Teacher does have a few laughs, though they have little connection to either the plot of theme of the movie, and it's probably rates a 6 on the Judd Apatow Raunch-O-Meter. It's not aggressively repellent and you might enjoy it if you're in the right mood, but it follows Green Lantern as another big movie of summer 2011 that appears to have been made by people who didn't know what the smeg they were doing.