reviewed by Brian "The Naked Gun" Felts
& Benn "Where's the Humanity?" Farrell
The story is exactly the same as the original, a retired minor league baseball player named Morris
Buttermaker, played by Billy Bob Thornton (Friday Night Lights,) is asked to coach a bunch of rag
tag group of kids who join a little league baseball team. The kids have zero talent and Buttermaker
is a drunk but after he recruits a bad boy Kelly Leak, and his ex-girlfriends daughter, Amanda Whurlitzer,
whom he taught how to pitch, the team gets better until it makes the championship game.
Billy Bob is the only actor of note other than Greg Kinnear and both of them mail in their performances.
In the original movie Walter Matthau played Buttermaker and was brilliant. Billy Bob didn't match his
performance. His motivation was all over the place and it didn't make since, even if you didn't see the
original. Sammie Kane Kraft played Amanda and there was nothing she could do to compare herself to the
previous actress who did the part, Academy Award winner Tatum O'Neil. There was no good acting in this
movie.
The main problem is this, the modern movie became too PC. In the original there are two scenes where the
two baseball coaches slap, and I do mean slap, their players when the screw up. Here, the closest we get
to a slap is Greg Kinnear barely slapping the cap off of the pitcher. Those two scenes in the original
show the depth of the problem that parents have with competition in little league, much like the latest
incident just last week when it was revealed that a coach paid a kid on his team to throw a pitch and hit
a handicapped kid to hurt him to keep him from playing, because rules of the league said all players have
to play. That is real life and this movie didn't touch on it at all. Why make the movie if you aren't going
to address the issues the original brought up? A complete waste of film.
I will tell you that this is a bad movie and with the exception of a few Billy Bob jokes it is not funny nor is
it good. I would venture that any one who saw this and said it was good did not see the original and therefore
their opinion blows. Take the money you would use to see this movie at the theaters and go and rent the original,
it simply is much better.
Brian - the Naked Gun I really didn't care for this movie one bit. I thought all the child actors sucked, even the one that played Whurlitzer. I though the kid who played Tanner acted like a little borderline personality freak who got on my nerves every time he
opened his stupid little mouth. I DID enjoy Billy Bob Thornton to some degree, but his character's motivation was all over the place. He consistently
had revelation after revelation about how much of an a**hole he is, and continues to make mistakes to prove it. I
don't even consider the few laughs Thornton got out of me worth higher than my lowest rating, since all Thornton did was
strap on his "redneck" shtick and looked drunk half the time. Way too easy for this multi-Academy Award® nominee. I thought Greg Kinnear (As Good As It Gets) did a good job of not overplaying the nemeses of the movie, if there is
one. Kinnear's take on this opposing coach was very real to what I've seen on the sidelines and dugout of youth
recreational sports today, from both coaches AND parents. This picture convinces me that one time independent filmmaker Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused)
is now a full time hack. He is simply another victim of the corporate movie machine. There were SO many places where
the original "Bad News Bears" movie from the 1970s pushed the envelope between adult and child interaction, but Linklater
followed the corporate code and DID NOT show a child getting slapped or drinking real beer instead of non-alcoholic
beer in the final scene. There was NO reason for this movie to be remade. If you're going to remake a movie, remake it with a purpose. The purpose
with this remake was to dull down the more controversial material from the original. The only difference between these two
pictures was the cinematography was far better in this version. Overall, the material sucked, the performances sucked for the most part and the director had no balls. This remake is the perfect
example of why you don't make remakes of certain movies just to make a remake. Remake something that needs to be
transcended from its time into something new cinema audiences will accept, like "Cape Fear," a decent and useful remake. The new "Bad News Bears" is just another notch on a crap loaded summer of Hollywood's dumbest releases. Benn - Where's the Humanity?
This movie should not have been made. This remake of the 1975 movie does nothing to address the
issues that the original movie showed with parents getting out of control in little league sports.
Rarely can you say that a movie made thirty years ago is more on the cutting edge then a movie made
in 2005 but this is an exception.