Movie Review: 'Bad Teacher'

When dealing with an anti-hero in movies, we're usually presented with some form of a despicable individual who goes through a character arc and eventually comes out a changed person...a fact that Bad Teacher sorely should have taken note of.

Vulgarity is at an all time high with the character of Elizabeth Halsey (Cameron Diaz); she's a gold-digging, self-centered, conniving excuse for a human being (and trust me, I can add way more less-than-pleasant adjectives to that description). She steals, does drugs while still on campus, and even tells a bright-faced little girl that the cookies she baked for her "taste like shit". She definitely has no business teaching -- and she makes it clear she has no interest in it either. Her one reason for sticking around: to make the $10,000 she needs to get the boob job she needs in order to snag a wealthy man who will take care of her. I know, feminism has taken a real hit with that synopsis.

Part of me enjoyed how blatantly bad this bad teacher was...while the other part of me kind of just really, really didn't like her. She's so hard to like, in fact, that one may find it hard to fully immerse themselves in the film. After all, she's the protagonist, the person we're supposed to be rooting for...and frankly, I was completely indifferent towards her quest. Perhaps it sounds like I'm getting a little too deep for a movie of this kind -- it exists simply to make the audience laugh, nothing more, nothing less. However, a good handful of laugh-out-loud jokes (the best, unfortunately, you've probably already heard in the trailers) can only take you so far when you start to feel like you're heading towards a dead end. I could deal with the practically non-existent character arc, but the film really takes a blow from its complete lack of plot progression. With a short hour and a half running time, the time should fly by, but around midway through I couldn't help but get a bit tired of seeing a bad person do increasingly bad things, which, a funny as it was at times, left no room for variety.


Cameron Diaz is surprisingly raunchy and downright entertaining as Elizabeth. This is her best comedic performance since There's Something About Mary, and while her performance alone can't bring Bad Teacher into in the same league as the Farrelly Brothers smash hit, she earns a hard "A". A few scenes left me gasping for air (most notably a dry hump scene between Diaz and Timberlake), and it was moments like that that leave me split. My final consensus? Bad Teacher isn't at the top of the class, but provides enough smutty laughs to give it a passing grade.

Rating: C