An Average Grade

Rating: Null/10 (24 June 2011)

Bad teacher is not a bad movie; it's just like most teachers we've known—average—just surviving. And so, Cameron Diaz's Elizabeth Halsey has one goal: to find a man to take care of her, a difficult task in a middle school where the richest teacher turns out to be too weird to take seriously. The gym teacher: too poor.
On the way to her survival, she takes drugs, seduces, steals, and cheats—just generally a bad teacher who nonetheless gets asked back. Not a totally unusual situation for those of us who have been around education for a while and seen a rogue teacher or two or three. Or those of us who enjoyed Billy Bob Thornton's Bad Santa, in which his "bad" becomes the litmus test. Bad Teacher is a weak cousin for its lack of bite and Billy Bob's charming maliciousness.
What's interesting about Elizabeth is that she's not very likable; she's just a hard case doing her wicked best. In fact, she has enough moxie to make her more interesting than just about any other colleague, administrators included. The antics she pulls like smoking pot in her car or giving a boy student her bra are indefensible and would lead to most teachers' dismissal, but for the purposes of fiction and comedy, she gets a kind of audience tenure.
Then, too, if I had a teacher who looked like that, I might have learned something, anything, just to keep her around. What we finally learn is that looks count and good guys finish last. Lessons learned.