Comedy. R. 1 hour, 32 minutes. At area theaters.
All legs and hair and eyeliner and attitude, Cameron Diaz makes a formidable bad teacher in the raunchy new comedy from director Jake Kasdan (“Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story,” “Orange County”).
She’s nasty, conniving and selfish as Elizabeth Halsey, a middle-school instructor who cares more about scamming money for breast implants than about student participation or test scores.
Diaz is funny, all right, but she is no miracle worker, so she can’t erase the movie’s slow spots or make it feel shorter than its 92-minute running time (it feels much, much longer, never a good sign for a comedy).
“Bad Teacher” is as uneven as that wobbly desk you got stuck with in seventh grade. It’s amusing in plenty of spots but wastes too much time focusing on jokes that are repetitive and exaggerated instead of rewarding better characters with more screen time (Jason Segel as a laid-back gym coach intrigued by Elizabeth is the film’s secret weapon, and he’s virtually invisible for the first half-hour or so).
As the film opens, Elizabeth is saying goodbye to the colleagues she despises at John Adams Middle School, happy to be leaving her job to marry a rich guy. But he’s onto the fact that she’s only after his money and dumps her, leaving Elizabeth with no choice but to return.
Then a savior arrives in the form of substitute teacher Scott (an appropriately goofy Justin Timberlake, who turns out to be a braver comedian than you may have imagined).
Scott reveals that his family has money. Elizabeth immediately starts trying to seduce him but, foiled by Scott’s general cluelessness, realizes she must formulate another plan of attack. She believes she needs the breasts of her dreams to pry Scott’s attention from another teacher’s squeaky-clean charms, and she knows she can’t afford them on a teacher’s salary.
When Elizabeth inevitably starts caring about her students’ success — for all the wrong reasons, naturally — and gradually grasps the sly appeal of the gym coach, “Bad Teacher” takes off.
Thank Segal in part, because the guy is always funny, and Timberlake gets some of the biggest laughs in a particularly crude sex scene (though the song with which his character woos Miss Squirrel is perhaps the film’s funniest moment).
The movie may not earn an A-plus, but at least it’s far from getting an F.
