Believe it or not Cameron Diaz has been nominated for four Golden Globes during her career. However, it is less surprising to find out that these nominations came earlier in her career and her last one was actually in 2002 for Gangs of New York. Since then, she’s been more miss than hit with the likes of What Happens in Vegas, Knight and Day, The Green Hornet and The Box (called the worst movie ever upon release) all being panned by critics and shunned by audiences. When released in 2011, Bad Teacher made substantial profit grossing over $200million, but does the film warrant the commercial success?
The short answer is “no”. The longer answer is “no way!”. Cameron Diaz is the titular bad teacher Elizabeth Halsey who we meet leaving the school after just a year to get married to a really rich man so she never has to work again. However, when she returns home from school her fiance ditches her for that very reason and she is forced to return to her job as a teacher, the only thing she knows how to do (so how bad she is at everything else is anyone’s guess).
Elizabeth Halsey is arguably the worst ‘protagonist’ ever to grace the screen. She is a wholly unlikeable character and the combination of horrible writing and Diaz’s ‘sex sells’ performance make you beg for her comeuppance, which unfortunately never arrives (another flaw in the film after the lengths she goes through). But whoever thought that a gold-digging bimbo whose only ambition in life is to get a boob job and be lazy is a likeable character needs to be seriously punished.
When Halsey returns to the school we are introduced to Amy Squirrel (Lucy Punch) who seems to be an all round nicer character than Halsey and a moral compass in a world of wholly messed up characters (minus the gym teacher played by Jaseon Segel). However, about half way through Bad Teacher, the story changes and you end up disliking Amy Squirrel, meaning you are left with two horribly poor characters to watch in a tussle that you really could not care less about.
There are more laughs than expected but they fall well short of memorable. In fact, the only reason that they are funny could well be because they are placed against this canvas of nothingness. The children, or even Diaz’s interactions with the children, should be a source for much of the comedy but nothing is really ever made of this. There are references to other things that will be lost on many audiences.
Bad Teacher is a slightly entertaining joyride that seems to be cashing in on Cameron Diaz’s attempts to still look sexy. A few jokes hit the spot but the majority leave a horrible rotting taste in your mouth.
My Rating: 4/10.
The X-Men series has come under a lot of criticism in it’s time despite the critical success that X-Men, X2 and X-Men: First Class has enjoyed. So if three of the five films have gone down well then why do fans of the X-Men continue to be critical of the series? A lot of the criticism comes from the messed up continuity of the franchise and if you look hard enough you will find plenty of issues with the continuity throughout all five films; X-Men: The Last Stand came under fire for ruining a lot of hard work that Bryan Singer had set up in the first two instalments and X-Men Origins: Wolverine upset fans by just not being very good and ruining Gambit, a character that fans had wanted to see on screen for far too long for him to just be dismissed like he is.
Everyone wanted a sequel to X-Men: The Last Stand and it seems as though The Wolverine could be the closest thing that we see to this. With this being a sequel it also gives the opportunity for former characters to return to the franchise. Returning characters was hinted at with the other prequel titled Days of Future Past but it seems that maybe fans were misled and Patrick Stewart’s and Famke Janssen’s comments about returning to the franchise could have been meant about The Wolverine rather than Days of Future Past. I, for one, would love to see some of the old characters return and it might be able to give an explanation to what happened to Cyclops, explain Professor X’s return and feature more of Angel perhaps. Unfortunately, I don’t think that this will happen though because the film will be set in Japan.
The Movie Universe 