Bad News Bears (2005)

Directed by Richard Linklater. Starring Billy Bob Thornton, Sammi Kane Kraft, Greg Kinnear, Marcia Gay Harden, Brandon Craggs, Timmy Deters, Jeffrey Davies, Ridge Canipe, Troy Gentile, Aman Johal, Tyler Patrick Jones, Jeffrey Tedmori, Kenneth Harris. [PG-13]

Routine fly ball reboot of the popular, foul-mouthed 1976 sports comedy finds Linklater in a commercial mood (even more so here than School of Rock), but what limited inspiration he brings to the project doesn’t extend to a reason for doing it in the first place. Although the performance is sometimes little more than a PG-13 riff on his misanthropic crook from Bad Santa, Thornton is aptly cast as a boozy, womanizing slob of an ex-ballplayer hired to coach a Little League baseball team made up of the misfits and rejects who weren’t accepted onto any of the other teams. Some of his acerbic, off-the-cuff remarks are funny, but character behavior across the board is often so slavish to the formula, it doesn’t even make sense; Thornton loses his edge in the second half as he (sort of) cleans up his act and starts to care…and abruptly turns into a win-at-all-costs jerk before becoming halfway decent again. A better idea would have been to firmly push the material into hard-R territory—the kids were arguably even ruder and more profane in the original film, which was the gimmick that ended up being its “calling card”—and to satirize political correctness instead of caving into it, but it is what it is, and it’s an okay time-killer. Linklater also co-produced.

55/100