Bad News Bears (2005): Dir: Richard Linklater / Cast: Billy Bob Thornton, Greg Kinnear, Marcia Gay Harden, Sammi Kane Kraft, Sonya Eddy: Advertised as a family film while lurking in the gutter of profanity and lewd behaviour unfit for its target audience. It is a sports comedy about retaliation and the team of misfits taken to championship level in baseball. Ever since the original Bad News Bears was released in 1976 audiences have been bombarded with shameless imitations and this one is one of the worst. It is a curious project for director Richard Linklater who seems able to work with any genre. He previously made Dazed and Confused as well as the overrated School of Rock. Billy Bob Thornton plays a former player now exterminator who agreed to coach the team. This is a xerox of his Bad Santa role in attitude but has little of the depth of that role. Thornton basically goes by the motions without challenge. Other roles are even worse off including Greg Kinnear as that ever familiar ignorant rival coach, and Marcia Gay Harden as that ever familiar mother of one of the players who will warm up to Thornton. The children are not quite on par with Tatum O'Neal from the original film. Teamwork and sportsmanship is not the item here. This film is promoting a vulgar version of what it was and for parents falling for its advertisements that is clearly bad news. Score: 2 / 10

Quite often, the quality of a movie depends heavily on the expectations of the audience going into see it. In the case of the 2005 remake of The Bad News Bears, expectations were most likely lower than the average baseball film. Though it is helmed by the enormously talented and creative Richard Linklater, little of his talent is utilized in this otherwise bland and, at times, disjointed tale of a group of ragtag Little League rejects who form together to create an unlikely winning combination.Billy Bob Thornton as the alcoholic coach Morris Buttermaker is at times likable and sympathetic while at others he is a complete and utter wretched person. Though this would work in some scripts, here it feels cheap and rings false, with Buttermaker and most of the rest of the cast being used by the plot as puppets. Hardly any of these characters' actions feel genuine or reasonable; rather they seem to be acting in a movie.The best part of the film, the championship game which takes up the last twenty minutes or so, reveals some nice touches but still is not quite capable of capturing the right balance between salty adolescence and sympathetic losers. Greg Kinnear's antagonist also seems to fall into the all-too big category of bad guys being bad simply for the sake of being the protagonist's obstruction. Whether this is a better film than the original 1976 must be decided by the audience, but it certainly fails to be any more surprising or memorable.

Billy Bob seems to have made a career out of playing these rather undesirable characters, and to be fair he does it very well. Few people can fall down in a drunken stupor as convincingly.I didn't see the original so can only rate this in it's own right. I'm not a fan of baseball either so have no idea if it is a true reflection on the game.There are a decent bunch of suitable misfits playing the Bears, and a suitably repulsive rival coach admirably played by Kinnear. The kids do their part well, and can't be blamed for the fact that there is very little originality in the story.There are some really funny moments from a decent script and direction, but by the end of the movie Billy Bob and his antics are looking tired. Still, worth watching for a few cheap laughs.

Someone said it was pointless to compare this movie to the original "The Bad News Bears" of 1976. What? This is a remake of that film, so not comparing the two would simply be willful ignorance. But I suppose ignorance is bliss to some.However, even if you don't compare the two, anyone with a semblance of standards would realize that the 2005 "Bears" incarnation is simply a colossal waste of enormous talent, starting with director Richard Linklater (whose "Dazed and Confused" and "School of Rock" were spot-on), to its stars, the great Billy Bob Thornton and the sublime Greg Kinnear, to its co-stars, including the always great Marcia Gay Harden to a cast of some very talented child actors.The 2005 script was, at best, a broad farce, whereas the original was sharp-edged and authentic. What's more, the new version includes a variety of pointless changes (changing the Yankees coach's name from Roy Turner to Roy Bullock?) alterations clearly designed to titillate (Councilor Whitewolf in 2005 is now a man-hungry cougar; the team's sponsor is no longer Chico's Bail Bonds "Let Freedom Ring" but a strip club; the league dinner has been moved from Pizza Hut to Hooters), yet the "evolution" reveals the new film's true lack of sack. (Appropriate, I suppose, since science is showing men now in their 20s apparently are exhibiting a decline in testosterone and other male reproductive markers.) Even the smoking-hot Turner's mom (Shari Summers) of the original film has been replaced by a thin-but-frumpy housefrau. Don't even get me started on the new Kelly Leak comparison to the ultra-cool one portrayed by Jackie Earle Haley.Some other reviewer said if you liked "Bad Santa" you'll like this. I'm wondering if he saw either film: "Bad Santa" was brilliant, an amazing display of Thornton's unchecked id surrounded by career-making performances by Tony Cox, the late Bernie Mack and other talent at the top of their game. The 2005 "Bad News Bears" was simply a bummer.