Insipid screenplay

It’s tedium all the way, with no special acting talents in Jake Kasdan’s
Bad Teacher, which nosedives after the establishing shots


Apart from Cameron Diaz showing enough cleavage,
there is not much substance in the film

IF one swallow doesn’t a summer make, so also one big star cannot carry a film with her. As if to prove the adage once more, the sexy Cameron Diaz shows it in Bad Teacher.

Her co-star Justin Timberlake is a promising lad, who is still aspiring at stardom but an insipid screenplay by Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg and even worse handling by director Jake Kasdan makes the fare trite, and even puerile after the first quarter. It nosedives after the establishing shots.

True Bad Teacher is no serious teacher-student film in the same vein as Dead Poet’s Society or The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and it’s meant to be an out and out comedy but even there it misses the mark by a long way.

When comely Elizabeth Hasley (Diaz) goes to teach at a rather prim and proper school, she has much on her mind, one of them being marrying her meal ticket and getting out of what she thinks is a bogus day job.

So when substitute teacher Scott (Justin Timberlake) comes by, it seems a good proposition till hysterical Amy (Lucy Punch) throws her hat in the ring. By now, Elizabeth has already made Amy her bete noire.

For variety, if one can call it that, the staff comprises a range of misfits as teachers and with problems that would have been associated more with their wards.

So Principal Wally Snur (John Michael Higgins) has his hands full and PT instructor Russell (Jason Segal) also making a play for Elizabeth, who just can’t imagine being married to a PT instructor.

In a set-up like this, can one expect anything better? Actually the film is just 91 minutes long but it seems endless. If there were any good lines, they must have dropped to the floor of the editing room. It’s tedium all the way, with no special acting talents.

There’s a car-wash and other attempts to provoke laughs but apart from Cameron Diaz showing enough cleavage to sink a ship. But the "what next?" query falls on deaf ears and no acting talent whatsoever. Bad Teacher is a clear no-no. So steer clear of it.

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