The voids of laugher speaks volumes

Rating: 3/10 (22 June 2011)

Bad Teacher had a strong premise for a comedy, a teacher is really bad and hates her job. It was marketed a raunchy hard-R comedy: sadly it was a film that was lacking, despite the best efforts of the actors.
Elizabeth Halsey (Cameron Diaz) is the bad teacher in question who leaves the profession and forced to return when her fiancé dumps her for her gold digging ways. She returns to John Adams Middle High (JAMS) and sets out to win over Scott Delacorte (Justin Timberlake), a geeky substitute teacher who is the heir to a watch empire. He particularly likes women with big breasts and Elizabeth plans to get a boob job: but needs the money. But Scott himself is attached to Amy Squirrel (Lucy Punch), a quirky caring teacher who gets the best results in school. At the same time Elizabeth has a suitor in the form a Gym/P.E. teacher (Jason Seagel). When Elizabeth finds out the prize for the best school results in the Illinois State Test is a big cheque, she sets about to ensure her class is the best.
The jokes were just lacking through the film. I was in a cinema that was 75% full and there were a lot of teachers in it and I can say with honesty that there was very little laugher, a few chuckles and no belly laughs. That says a lot about a comedy because the point is to make us laugh. I believe one of two things happened, either, that the film was originally going to be a PG-13 film and the producers thought that the film was more marketable as a R-rated comedy, or the more likely that it was cut much of the swearing out to get a PG-13 rating, and failed. Most of the use of the F word in the red band trailer was cut out from the actual film. They were also plot points, like when Elizabeth offered to tutor her students, goes nowhere. The pace throughout was just very slow and Bad Teacher needed more snap.
Acting wise the best performance was Seagel best person the film, having the best lines with his role and the most grounded character in the film. He was simply natural as a gym teacher who just wants to have fun, though he has a dodgy line which makes him sound like a potential rapist. Punch is solid and she is deliberately over the top as a quirky teacher, but she does not have many good lines and Punch has to make the performance as physical as possible. She also gets very screwed over in the film. Diaz does her best but the character is not very well developed and her traits flipped like a switch. Most of the time she is shown as an uncaring person, only interested in herself and only got into teaching for the hours: but at the same time she does help some students and surely she should have cared as some point about teaching. She is also too ruthless, she needed to be a deeper character.
I also have to comment about the actual school On Wikipedia it describes JAMS as a school in a poor area: it was certainly not, it was in a very middle class area. I liked how the kids in the school actually looked normal and not in cliques like the jocks, the nerds, the pretty girls, cheerleaders, etc They were mixed. But at the same time it seems like that the teachers only have one class: when I was in school the teachers had to teach classes over many years, if they only taught one class then they would have a very short working week.
Overall, a big disappointment.