Grade C… has potential, needs to apply itself

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This article was published 24/06/2011 (5538 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Elizabeth Halsey (Cameron Diaz) is just like one of those worst-case-scenario teachers we heard about in Waiting for Superman… only hot.

She’s not in it to teach. She’s cashing her meagre paycheque while waiting for the opportunity to reel in some gullible rich shmuck. And when a likely prospect gets wise to her gold-digging ways, she resolves to make an extra $10,000 by whatever means necessary to get a boob job to land herself a wealthy boob.

In the meantime, she sneaks booze breaks and cat naps into her work day while endlessly screening teacher movies such as Stand and Deliver and Dangerous Minds, letting Hollywood handle the heavy lifting of inspiring her befuddled middle-school students in the not-so-tough environs of suburban Chicago.

She sets her sights on a preppy new prospect, starry-eyed substitute teacher Scott Delacourt (Justin Timberlake, Diaz’s ex-boyfriend), the scion of a luxury watch manufacturing family, a guy as nice, well-meaning and innocent as Elizabeth is bitchy, self-centred and, um, sexually-seasoned.

But Elizabeth has some competition in Miss Squirrel (Brit actress Lucy Punch), a peppy, gosh-golly nightmare who gets downright aggressive when Elizabeth starts infringing on her romantic turf.

It’s not like Elizabeth doesn’t have a more likely prospect. That would be the gym teacher Russell (Jason Segel), a regular guy who sees Elizabeth as the ruthless schemer she is, but wants her anyway.

As he proved with Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, director Jake Kasdan has a gift for leavening rude comedy with a breezy attitude. The script by Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg (The Office) is spiked with occasionally inspired concepts, as when Elizabeth hits on the idea of employing negative reinforcement to teach To Kill a Mockingbird, lining up the kids in the gym and smacking them in the head with a dodgeball every time they give a wrong answer. (Atticus Finch would be horrified.)

It is perversely refreshing to see Diaz play the sleaze, just as there is a contrary kick seeing pop star Timberlake play such a clueless naif. With contributions by some sterling supporting comic players, including Thomas Lennon, John Michael Higgins, and The Office’s Phyllis Smith (especially funny here), the movie still never quite rises above C-grade aspirations. It’s a bit of an academic decline for Kasdan after Walk Hard.

But there is sufficient smarts and rude laughs here to result in some good, dirty summer fun.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Movie review

Bad Teacher

Starring Cameron Diaz, Jason Segel and Lucy Punch

Grant Park, Kildonan Place, Polo Park, St. Vital, Towne

89 minutes

14A

3 stars out of five