After a highly effective smutty wink of an ad campaign, one could be forgiven for thinking that the “bad” in “Bad Teacher” refers to a public school educator who fools around with her students. A lot of adolescent males may turn out opening weekend in the hopes of seeing Cameron Diaz stoke their hot-for-teacher fantasies, but that’s not what the movie’s about.
Make no mistake: Diaz’s character, Elizabeth Halsey, is bad, a coarsely self-centered and manipulative gold-digger. The only reason she’s a teacher at John Adams Middle School is that her goal in life is to land $10,000 for breast-enhancement surgery. The basic joke of “Bad Teacher,” which director Jake Kasdan hits the audience with over and over again, is that Elizabeth is the most dislikable character of the year.
Diaz, in smeary make-up, certainly makes ill-tempered shrillness convincing, but there isn’t much spark to her performance, and there’s so little bounce or real shock to the movie’s overly controlled “look how rude we’re being!” black comedy that the audience is left stranded.
Viewers won’t find themselves on Elizabeth’s side or anyone else’s, really. This is a film that tries to pass off misanthropic blunt-wittedness as “edge. Justin Timberlake, as a sexy-nerd substitute, has enough campy sincerity to make viewers wish he’d been allowed an additional note, and Jason Segel, as a romantic phys-ed teacher, lays on the puppy-dog sweetness.
The best actor of the bunch, though, may be Lucy Punch as Elizabeth’s nice-teacher enemy. Looking like an angelic Lady Gaga, she turns this goody two shoes into the world’s most self-actualized valley girl. Even when Lucy Punch’s character is insufferable, audiences will like her — a trick that “Bad Teacher” could have used more of.
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