Bill Gibron is a veteran film critic from Tampa, Florida.Maybe a better title would be Socially Inappropriate Teacher. Or maybe Craven Educator with the Potential to Change. Sure, Cameron Diaz's dumped debutante Elizabeth Halsey wants nothing more than to marry a rich man and live spectacularly off his money. It's what every hot chick with a smokin' bod deserves, right? Of course, the story mandates that her nuptial ruse be uncovered, requiring her to return to the one place she hates more than anything else -- the classroom. Often too drunk and detached to teach and purposefully shunning her needy students, she lets in-class movies like Stand and Deliver and Lean on Me do the heavy educational lifting. How she ever became an instructor in the first place remains a solid mystery. In order to save herself from this dire, dead-end life, she plots a means of making $10K to get a man-entrapping boob job while eyeing the supposedly wealthy do-gooder sub Scott Delacorte (Justin Timberlake). All that stands in her way is an overachieving perky pariah coworker named Amy Squirrell (Lucy Punch), a dolphin-obsessed dullard principal (John Michael Higgins), and a friendly PE coach (Jason Segel) who can't figure out why Elizabeth won't give him the time of day. Oh yeah, and a group of nameless kids with the standard, stereotypical middle school maladies.
Thus the rest of director Jake Kasdan's genial if spotty comedy is a series of set-ups, get-rich-quick plot devices interspersed with crude sexual references, and the occasional bow to the realities of teaching the pre-teen. The script, by Lee Eisenberg and Greg Stupnitsky, is more Year One than The Office (projects both men are responsible for), uneven in tone and not quite capable of maintaining a firm film point of view. This is a movie that wants to be rude, raunchy, and ridiculous, yet can only come up with F-bombs, genitalia jokes, and the occasional pot reference. We want to see Elizabeth rebel against all the faculty stiffs she's surrounded by, to take these bureaucratic backstabbers down a few dozen notches.
But Bad Teacher doesn't have the shameless cojones to go for it. Instead, it constantly pulls back. It's almost as if the filmmakers felt they would run into trouble with some whimpering watchdog group -- the MPAA, the PTA, any number of pro-PC irritants -- and prematurely hedged their bets. Sure, it's okay for Diaz (in a very good performance) to discuss oral sex and personal perversions, just as long as no children are actually insinuated or endangered. You can talk roughly to them, just don't infer anything beyond the bad words. For a movie that promises to corrupt anything that comes in its path, to take no prisoners and metaphysically urinate all over propriety, it's pretty sedate. There's no sense of anarchy, no manic desire to truly push the envelope of acceptability.
For the stars, however, it's smooth scatological sailing. Diaz is indeed in her element here, radiating a kind of radical antisocialism that should earn her a new league of loyal "students." For his part, former fling Timberlake plays against type and does so rather well. As the villainess, Punch is perfect. Her sunny/sinister edge adds greatly to her often aggravating dialogue, and Segel shines every time he's onscreen, often coming across as the real comedic voice of this effort. For his part, Kasdan doesn't get in anyone's way. He finds a means of stringing together the often incompatible vignettes in a way that has us rooting for Elizabeth's happiness and Amy's comeuppance.
While never quite as funny as it should be, and constantly missing obvious opportunities, Bad Teacher is still a jolly, joke-filled escape. Indeed, perhaps calling it Inconsistently Witty Professor would have been more suitable.
