Talk about "Bad News Bears" here:
Review by: Breanne Derby
Plot Summary
A remake of the 1976 classic, Bad News Bears stars Billy Bob Thornton as Morris Buttermaker, a professional baseball player turned boozehound who takes a job coaching a little-league team for some extra cash. The team he's hired to coach, however, is a team of oddballs who were forced together by Liz Whitewood (Marcia Gay Harden), a mother who was outraged when her son was left off of the other teams in the league because he was lousy. The team that she produced was a motley group of boys ranging from a boy who was only playing to put it on his college applications, to a boy in a wheelchair. Can the Bears possibly work past all of their personality quirks and become a functioning baseball team? Well, sort-of.
Review
Once again I find myself reviewing a remake of an old film. The number of remakes is continually disappointing. Every day their numbers grow a bit higher, and every day I get more and more irritated at the lack of original and entertaining motion pictures. There are some promising looking films for this summer (examples are currently eluding me, but I'm sure there are), but for the most part it's been a great number of remakes and sequels. Unfortunately, I have not seen the 1976 version of this film, so I cannot compare the two and decide which is better, but I'm sure one of them is, and I'm sure each film is different in its own way. Walter Matthau and Billy Bob Thornton are different people, after all.
Despite its PG-13 rating, I wasn't expecting this film to be as vulgar as it was. The jokes were often crude, and I don't think I heard anyone in my theatre (which consisted of me, the thirteen-year-olds in the back row seeing their first movie without Mommy, and the three families in front of me) laugh at any of the distasteful things that Buttermaker said to the players (not even the thirteen-year-olds). I can just imagine mothers covering the ears of their own kids in horror throughout a good deal of the movie. It's rated PG-13 for a reason, and if people took their six-year-olds and then were aghast at what they saw and heard on the screen, they got what was coming to them.
This film was a bit slow with the opening, and the first half of it was somewhat dull, but as the film progressed, it became slightly better, but not much. It's possible that I was just accepting that the humor wasn't witty, or even "kids say the darndest things"-ish, and trying to pay attention to the plot while ignoring the references to a life of sex and alcoholism every ten seconds (that's not an exaggeration, it's probably an accurate estimate). For something that was supposed to be a comedy, it made me laugh precious few times, in-fact, the only time I vividly remember laughing out loud was when the power in my theatre went out five or ten-minutes before the end, and the vast majority of the people who sat through the first two hours got up and left saying "Well, we can figure out how it ended" and it did end. It could have escaped corniness at the end, but the writers opted for it instead, leaving the kids who weren't already corrupted to become so, and leaving parents wondering what their own eleven and twelve-year-olds did at little league.
As for the age of the children, they were supposed to all be eleven and twelve, but some of them were clearly much older, and while most of them were four-foot-five, there were two or three who were five-foot-four. They just didn't look young enough to be twelve, especially not the star hitter, who I imagine was at least fifteen.
When a film stars so many children, it is often a shock to see one where all of the children are excellent actors and actresses, and this film is no exception. Some of the children were very good actors, and some were not. Surprisingly enough, the oldest children were not necessarily the best actors, and I was surprised by some of the children’s abilities, though it's hard to really determine how endowed they were because for the most part their scenes were very brief.
Conclusion
At first I didn't enjoy this film at all, and before I had gone into the theatre, I didn't really think I was going to. The previews I had seen didn't really portray it as something I would find entertaining, and for the beginning of the movie, I was right. The characters were constantly bickering with one another, and the kids were acting like "adults" (a.k.a. what the writers, who haven't been kids in a long time, think that kids think adults act like) and until they began to appreciate each-other, the film wasn't looking great in my book. Luckily, the trailer wasn't the kind where you've seen it and you feel like you've just watched the abridged version of the movie. As the film progressed, the characters began to get along much better, and it was then that their strange personalities began to grow on me, like a small but slightly friendly fungus. I began this film not liking it at all, but when I left the theatre I was satisfied with how it had turned out. It had turned out okay. In the end it was sort-of like a crass, baseball version of 1994's Little Giants, with a drunkard for a coach, I guess it was okay.
