"Bad News Bears” (Paramount Pictures)
“Bad News Bears” is a remake of the 1976 film “The Bad News Bears,” and the good news is that the new “Bad New Bears” is better than the original. This can be laid directly at the feet of the most ornery cuss of them all, Billy Bob Thornton. Replete with tattoos galore and a cursing mouth, Billy Bob makes Morris Buttermaker a force to be reckoned with in all ways.
Buttermaker was once a professional ballplayer but now he is an exterminator. He is also a drunk and a carouser. Still for some reason Liz Whiteweood (Marcia Gay Harden) hires him to coach her son’s baseball team. He takes the job just for the money and then sits around as the kids fumble their way through practice.
Now these kids are the ones who weren’t good enough for the other teams. They are a motley crew who also swear like sailors. Maybe this is what endears them to Buttermaker, but for whatever reason he does begin to care about them. And eventually he whips them into shape and they start winning.
Billy Bob Thornton is perfectly cast as the grouchy, raucous Buttermaker. He has the right look, the right attitude, and the right talent for this role. At each step of the way as Buttermaker evolves, there is not a false move. Few actors could have played this role and made it less than a caricature, but Billy Bob can and does.
Marcia Gay Harden’s talent is wasted in this film. Hers is not much of a role and there is nothing to make it a standout. She does alright with it but never makes it into more than it is.
The same is not true for Greg Kinnear. He plays Roy Bullock, the coach of the trophy winning Yankees, who is Buttermaker’s biggest rival. Kinnear makes Bullock as smarmy as possible while still keeping him believable.
Sammi Kraft has the Tatum O’Neal role from the original film and is an asset to this movie. She plays the girl with the golden arm, a pitcher with a fast fastball. The audience likes her character from the moment she appears on screen and stays with that feeling all the way thorough to the completion of the movie.
The movie is rated PG-13 for profanity and it looks like a kids movie on the surface, but parents beware the language in this movie is horrible especially when it is coming out of the mouths of children. Aside from that the movie is also hilarious. I laughed out loud time and time again. Thornton was funny in “Bad Santa” but I think he is even funnier here.
For adults this is a laughmaking film from start to finish, but as far as taking the kiddies – I don’t think so.
I scored “Bad News Bears” a good news 7 out of 10.
