director
Richard Linklater
screenwriters
Glenn Ficarra
John Requa
based on
a screenplay by
Bill Lancaster
producers
Geyer Kosinski
Richard Linklater
cinematographer
Rogier Stoffers
music
Ed Shearmur
editor
Sandra Adair
cast
Billy Bob Thornton (Morris Buttermaker)
Greg Kinnear (Roy Bullock)
Marcia Gay Harden (Liz Whitewood)
Sammi Kane Kraft (Amanda Whurlitzer)
Ridge Canipe (Toby Whitewood)
Brandon Craggs (Mike Engelberg)
Jeff Davies (Kelly Leak)
Timmy Deters (Tanner Boyle)
Carlos Estrada (Miguel Agilar)
Emmanuel Estrada (Jose Agilar)
Troy Gentile (Matthew Hooper)
K.C. Harris (Ahmad Abdul Rahim)
Aman Johal (Prem Lahiri)
Tyler Patrick Jones (Timothy Lupus)
Jeffrey Tedmori (Garo Daragebrigadian)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 115m
u.s.
release: 7/22/05
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official website
other richard
linklater films
reviewed on this website:
- before
sunrise
(short
review)
- before
sunset
- the
newton boys
- a scanner darkly
- school
of rock
- suburbia
- waking
life
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If Bad News Bears isn't
the second film in Billy Bob Thornton's Bad trilogy (following
2003's Bad Santa), it should
be. Shambling into the frame and muttering dark, unprintable
things to himself, Thornton is an inspired choice to play the
new Coach Morris Buttermaker (Walter Matthau's role in the 1976
original), a broken-down has-been who takes a Little League team
full of misfits and steers them towards the championship game.
The movie is affable and nothing great, but it works, mostly
due to Thornton's charismatic anti-charisma. He is the unlikeliest
actor to play a lead role in a studio film, much less a studio
film with a cast of kids, and he knows it, and so do we. He plays
losers with a kind of shabby dignity, and his triumphs are ours;
we feel more comfortable rooting for him than for, say, Tom Cruise
or other streamlined models from the Hollywood factory.
I'm not sure Bad News Bears
needed to be remade; for one thing, in the nearly thirty years
since its first incarnation, we've been inundated with kiddie
sports films featuring wise-ass kids (hell, Keanu Reeves went
down this road four years ago in Hardball).
The original film was notable in its day for the amount of profanity
(albeit PG-rated) the kids were allowed to spew; the remake is
similarly colorful in its rhetoric, though some of the antics
have been toned down -- no smoking, no racial epithets (with
one exception delivered by a snotty opponent). Nothing here really
risks scandalizing parents, apart from the detail that the team's
sponsor is a strip club, and Buttermaker takes the kids out for
a victory chow-down at Hooters and leads them in a rousing rendition
of Eric Clapton's "Cocaine."
Some will be attracted to the
movie by Billy Bob, others by the director, Richard Linklater,
who has had one of the more varied careers among indie-filmmakers
of his generation. Linklater seems to approach Bad News Bears
as a bookend piece to his 2003 School
of Rock, in which a disgruntled has-been showed
kids the way to Led Zeppelin Valhalla. Those looking for the
Linklater of Dazed and Confused or Before
Sunset in the film will be baffled; he has made the movie
because he always wanted to make a baseball film, and this project
came across his desk, and he has done an honorable and unobtrusive
job. Linklater stages the games well, sometimes keeping the camera
at a good remove so that we can see an entire play unfold on
the diamond, rather that cheating with editing. He handles the
young cast deftly, except for ringers Sammi Kane Kraft (as the
girl pitcher who doesn't throw like a girl) and Jeff Davies (as
a punk with a mean swing), who are real-life athletes but quite
obviously not trained actors; in a couple of scenes, genuine
acting is needed from them, and they're just not up to it, but
they play beautifully.
The movie may end on a shot
of the red, white and blue fluttering over the field, but Bad
News Bears is no callow belch of patriotism or the ethic
of winning. In the home stretch, Buttermaker pushes the kids
hard to win, but then seems to understand (Thornton conveys it
mostly with his eyes) that this game should be more about letting
each kid play and have a good time. We want them to win,
if for no other reason than to wipe the smug grin off the opposing
team's coach (Greg Kinnear at his smarmiest), but ultimately
it's not important to the narrative. The movie is your standard
underdog sports comedy, with the ramshackle wit of Billy Bob
Thornton and the gentle touch of Richard Linklater. There are
worse ways to spend an afternoon.
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