As the phrase might suggest, edgy comedy is a fine line between hugging the wall of good taste or tumbling down the precipice into the depths of offensive content. Stay too close to the wall and you’ll only elicit a chuckle. Lean to far over and you end up alienating too many people in the audience. To further complicate the matter, if you try too hard to walk said fine line, the very audience you’re trying to attract gets turned off because it seems forced. Unfortunately for Director Jake Kasdan, he couldn’t muster up the courage to bring the audience to the edge with Bad Teacher, opting instead for a final product that, while still capable of scoring a few belly laughs, mostly fails when it tries to do anything too daring or politically incorrect.
Saying good riddance and leaving her past of teaching at Jams grade school behind her, Elizabeth Halsey (Cameron Diaz) drives off in her sports car only to arrive at her fiancés house to discover the marriage is off and the relationship is over, leaving her broke and living in an apartment with a large, moped driving softy (Eric Stonestreet). With no other option, she returns to her job teaching alongside the overly peppy Amy (Lucy Punch), the equally apathetic though more moral gym teacher Russell (Jason Segel), and the trust-fund toting substitute Scott (Justin Timberlake). Catching a whiff of Scott’s fortune, Elizabeth attempts to endear herself to him by hatching a plan to get breast implants which leads her to all manner of heinous deed and ultimately doing whatever she can to win the bonus, awarded to whichever teacher’s class scores highest on the state exams.
Cameron Diaz’s turn as Elizabeth Halsey is a badly needed return to her comical side that audiences only got a brief glimpse of back in There’s Something About Mary. The down side of her triumphant return is that aside from her great performance, the attempts at nonchalant crassness don’t come across as funny so much as contrived and desperate. Elizabeth is funniest when she displays utter contempt for the rules and the well-being of her students, not when she uses cheap shock comedy with racial slurs or drug references. The biggest problem with the Halsey character may be that she inspires little to no sympathy and thus it’s hard to care about the iota of growth she experiences from the start of the film up to the end.
While Diaz’s performance here is the most refreshing, it’s Jason Segel’s gym teacher, resigned to his fate, which generates the most laughs and easily scores the funniest line in the film with his response to the bemoaning of modern music and its inability to produce hits like “867-5309”. Finding the middle ground between his role as the pure and naïve Midwest-borne Marshall in How I Met Your Mother and the charismatic guy from Knocked Up, he mirrors Elizabeth’s lack of concern for student safety but has a lot more fun with it and in ways that score harder laughs. Timberlake proves once again that when he has narrow enough roles to play within a comedy that he can perform exceptionally well and in the case of Bad Teacher the character was tailored to his strengths. The combination of Diaz, Segel, and Timberlake in the same scene almost always pays off. Lucy Punch does well here, but her character rarely amounts to more than a caricature, which is unfortunate as she’s an incredibly capable actress when she has something substantial to play off of. Here she’s just Halsey’s comedic whipping boy and it’s rarely satisfying to see the film go after such cheap laughs.
Performances may be strong, but it takes the film until a third of the way through to hit its stride and even then the barrage of jokes is uneven. The film’s pacing tries to shove a large quantity of jokes into a bit and then it coasts along for ten minutes before trying again elsewhere. This makes for some dry spells in the flow of laughter and the drought is noticeable. Had screenwriters Gene Stupintsky and Lee Eisenberg found a way to create a more even spread in both the pacing and the type of humor Bad Teacher could have been more than just a decent comedy; with the cast assembled here, Bad Teacher should have been hilarious instead of just passably funny.
"Bad Teacher" opens June 24, 2011 and is rated R. Comedy. Directed by Jake Kasdan. Written by Gene Stupintsky, Lee Eisenberg. Starring Cameron Diaz, Jason Segel, John Michael Higgins, Justin Timberlake, Lucy Punch.
