Bad News Bears

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For the original 1976 film, see The Bad News Bears.

Bad News Bears
film poster
Directed by	Richard Linklater
Produced by	Richard Linklater
Written by	Bill Lancaster Glenn Ficarra John Requa
Starring	Billy Bob Thornton Greg Kinnear Marcia Gay Harden
Music by	Ed Shearmur
Distributed by	Paramount Pictures
Release date(s)	July 22, 2005
Running time	111 min.
Country	US
Language	English Spanish
Budget	$35 million
Box office	$35,323,292.50

Bad News Bears is the 2005 remake of the 1976 comedy film The Bad News Bears, produced by Paramount Pictures. It is directed by Richard Linklater and stars Billy Bob Thornton, Greg Kinnear, Marcia Gay Harden, and Sammi Kane Kraft. The writing team of Glenn Ficarra and John Requa were responsible for another Thornton film, Bad Santa.

Plot

Morris Buttermaker (Billy Bob Thornton) is a washed-up alcoholic minor-league baseball player who was kicked out of professional baseball for attacking an umpire. He works as an exterminator and is a crude womanizer. He coaches the Bears, a children's baseball team with poor playing skills. They play their first game and do not even make an out before he forfeits the game. Amanda Whurlitzer (Sammi Kane Kraft), a skilled pitcher, is the 12-year-old daughter of one of his ex-girlfriends. At his request, she joins the team. Kelly Leak (Jeffrey Davies), a local troublemaker, also joins the team, and the Bears start winning games. After their first victory, Buttermaker takes them to Hooters. The Bears eventually make it to the championship game. In the middle of that game, the Bears and Yankees fight. Later, Buttermaker changes the lineup, putting the benchwarmers in and taking out some of the good players. The Bears lose the game 8 to 7. After the game, Buttermaker gives them non-alcoholic beer, and they spray it all over each other. Although they did not win the championship, they have the satisfaction of trying, knowing that winning is not so important.

Reception

Critical reaction to Bad News Bears was mixed. The film holds a rating of 45% on Rotten Tomatoes and a score of 65 out of 100 on Metacritic.

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three stars out of four, praising Thornton's performance in particular, saying: "The movie is like a merger of [Thornton's] ugly drunk in Bad Santa and his football coach in Friday Night Lights, yet [he] doesn't recycle from either movie; he modulates the manic anger of the Santa and the intensity of the coach and produces a morose loser who we like better than he likes himself." James Berardinelli of ReelViews also gave Bad News Bears three stars out of four, calling it "an entertaining motion picture" that "won't make fans forget the original, but it's not so feeble that it disappears into the earlier movie's shadow."

Giving the film two stars out of five, Don R. Lewis of Film Threat said that it has "a few laughs" but that it "just trudges on, going through the motions of the original with no spark" and that it "suffer[s] from the unbearable, crushing weight of political correctness." Paula Nechak of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer called the film "simply another in a long line of utterly unnecessary remakes that, having nothing new to say, clutch at crassness and dumbness," while Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle said that while "the screenplay [...] makes the most of Thornton's dry, skewed humor, [...] nothing happens here that would distinguish this film from other sports movies."

Legacy

In a case of life imitating art, in 2012 a Los Angeles-area little league in financial difficulty received a donation from the owner of a local strip club in order to continue operating. Comparisons were immediately made to a scene in Bad News Bears in which the team received a donation from "Bo-Peeps Gentlemen's Club" and is required to put the logo of the strip club on their uniforms. The real-life club didn't require similar stipulations, preferring to donate in anonymity, however local civic leaders encouraged that the club in question be made public so that they could get the proper recognition they deserved.

External links

• Bad News Bears at the Internet Movie Database
• Bad News Bears at Box Office Mojo
• Bad News Bears at Rotten Tomatoes