Bad Teacher, Cameron Diaz

★★☆☆☆
<Review by: Sailesh Ghelani>

Directed by Jake Kasdan. Starring Cameron Diaz, Justin Timberlake, Jason Segel.

The trailer looked funny and Cameron Diaz looked hot. The movie is horrible and Diaz looks like she really, really doesn’t care.

Diaz plays Elizabeth, a penniless, middle-aged woman who does have relatively good looks to carry her through life and help her latch on to the next rich man who will get her out of having to teach at a middle school. Unfortunately, she doesn’t have big boobs and filches off her rich fiancé who finally dumps her. So she’s stuck being a good-for-nothing teacher who does dope, drinks and just shows movies to her class every week. In comes substitute teacher Scott Delacorte (Timberlake), well to do and eligible but alas, Elizabeth thinks it’s her small boobs that aren’t getting her in the sub’s good books.

Where does this movie go really? Yes she’s a bad teacher. We got that. Yes Delacorte seems mildly gay and totally banal. Jason Segel (best known from TVs How I Met Your Mother) as the lovable gym coach with a crush on our naughty educator is the nice guy who would like to see the good in Elizabeth. Kudos to him for that one; great acting Jason.

It’s one thing to have a film about an insidious character that turns all warm and fuzzy in the end. That doesn’t happen here. Neither does she stay ‘bad’. She’s just annoying. There’s no camaraderie between her and the students or her fellow teachers. There’s no emotion or depth to this person who you see sleeping with educators to get test answers so she can win a bonus and get a boob job.

The only reason you’d go to watch this film is probably because of that scene in the trailer… you know the one. Where the very old Cameron Diaz is trying to be a very young car wash girl in short shorts. Not even close to worth it. They actually have a school kid getting an erection in that scene (it’s cut by our censors). Just plain crass. So while she doesn’t give an ‘F’, we certainly do. On the flipside, if you have some nasty fantasies about Diaz and would like her to punish you by spanking your backside with a ruler, then you’ll be this teacher’s pet.

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