Fun, but...

Rating: 7/10 (24 June 2011)

You know exactly what you're getting with Bad Teacher - you're getting Cameron Diaz as a bad teacher Elizabeth. In her private life she is looking to hook a rich husband for his money: she smokes, drinks, takes drugs, swears a vast amount and sleeps around. As a teacher she does all that stuff, too: she is also a slacker, can't be bothered to remember her students' names, steals, abuses the kids... The list goes on and on. There is a plot of sorts, which involves Elizabeth trying to get money through fair means or foul (mostly foul) for a boob job in order to hook rich substitute teacher Justin Timberlake, and the efforts of by-the-book but irritating teacher Amy (Lucy Punch) to foil her, but the title pretty much says it all.
I must confess to enjoying it. A lot of it is pretty funny, Cameron Diaz clearly has a ball and is both funny and sexy (the car wash sequence is both at the same time), and Lucy Punch also does well with a character who spirals into mania as she fails to be able to do something about what she, and she alone, sees happening (I particularly liked the references to an unexplained incident in her past). So I was entertained throughout.
Now to reservations.
One is the fact that the central character is sociopathic - her every action is driven by "What's in it for me?" It's not so much that she gets away with it - that happens in real life all the time, and it's not exactly unknown in movies either. It's more that the final sequences promises some sort of redemption, and that simply doesn't happen in real life. Oh well, perhaps I'm just reading too much into it. It is a comedy, after all.
And two is that, with the exception of Jason Segel's gym teacher, not a single one of the adult characters behaves remotely believably at any point in the movie, which makes suspension of disbelief a difficult trick to pull off.