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Former professional baseball player and full-time alcoholic and pest controller Morris Buttermaker is bribed into coaching a kids Little League team. But what can a swearing lush really teach a bunch of misfit losers like the Bears? And will they ever be good enough to take on or beat their arch-rivals the Yankees and their over-competitive coach?
Don't ever allow director Richard Linklater to organise childcare for you. Following the successful formula of "School of Rock", he continues in the same vein, placing impressionable young minds under the influence of a deeply unsuitable mentor. And they don't come much more inappropriate than Billy Bob Thornton. Sure, this may be a remake of the 1976 movie of the same name, but it's held together by an energetic central performance. There's no impetus to understand baseball because though superficially a sports movie, Linklater is more interested in the coach-kids dynamic. He takes the usual gaggle of misfit archetypes (the smart kid, the fat one, the rebel, the tomboy, the disabled kid and the foreign one) and pairs them with the least suitable role model he can think of. Laughs ensue. Linklater doesn't linger on his jokes, which means there's room for more of them. In a nod to sports movie convention, there are plenty of montages, but he plays them for laughs, using painful-looking slapstick and schadenfreude to milk the humour from the situations. The pacing however stutters throughout, bouncing from one gag to another without building the plot or characters and feeling more like a showcase for Thornton
than the ensemble piece it should be. Linklater doesn't appear to have any real affection for the kids and they feel like stooges and plot devices as a result. Overall it's an uneven film that relies heavily on Thornton's performance, leaving it feeling like a star vehicle instead of a real attempt at movie-making.
Glenn Ficarra and John Requa's retooling of Bill Lancaster's original screenplay brings it up to date while retaining the anti-competitive message of the original. It's a lot closer to the knuckle than the first outing for the bears, with a 'shit' count that must go into the hundreds. It keeps the band of misfit underdogs from the original and in the spirit of the post-gross-out film industry adds some seriously politically incorrect aspects to the film. So there's a paraplegic team member, who is mocked but never babied and the coach that sleeps with one of the kids' mothers. The film trades on the age-old desire to overcome motif, but is surprisingly schmaltz free, using skewed life lessons in place of tired homilies about working as a team ("This is not a democracy. This is a dictatorship and I'm Hitler!"). The dialogue is clearly the product of a Tourette's sufferer with verbal diarrhoea, with even the kids getting in on the swearing act on a regular basis. It's brash and irreverent and still has the power to shock. Occasionally it feels like a one-man stand-up show, with the kids given precious little dialogue to get their teeth into. So it's difficult for the audience to care about them or their development as a team, as it only exists as a backdrop for Thornton's steal-stealing turn and even his character doesn't change that much.
There's something about putting Billy Bob Thornton in charge of a group of kids that's so incongruous that the very idea makes you smile. In a worried sort of way. He's one of those actors with a well-earned unsavoury reputation and it's something he plays on in many of his roles. As in "Bad Santa", his relationship with the kids is based on financial goals and deep mistrust. As Buttermaker he's the last person you'd want to leave your kids with; an alcoholic redneck with a good line in inappropriate analogies ("A tie's like kissing your sister." "Baseball doesn't always love you back; it's kind of like dating a German chick.") and a propensity to take them on pest extermination jobs. But despite the foul-mouthed perviness ("I haven't paid for sex in years."), he still manages to be oddly inspirational. Thornton is damned fine actor and he gives a lot of depth to his roles, making the clichéd turnaround from drunk to leader and mentor believable. You get the impression he's never entirely comfortable with his child co-stars, but that's pretty much the point.
Linklater has clearly used the same casting methods he employed in "School of Rock", mixing prodigious baseball talents with burgeoning actors. And the same flaws are clear for all to see; the actors aren't great at baseball and the baseball players aren't great at acting. Newcomer Sammi Kraft, who play's Thornton's estranged daughter was clearly cast for her pitching arm rather than her on-screen presence or acting talent. She mumbles her way through the film, as wooden as a chest-of-drawers and unable to do more than hit her marks and say her lines. And playing the role first taken by Tatum O'Neal doesn't do her any favours by comparison. Some of the kids are better, like Timmy Deters as a profane little ball of anger, but they never gel as a group in the same way as the "School of Rock" kids. A lot of that is down to the fact they're playing well-worn stereotypes that are always in the shadow of Thornton's performance. Even when he's unconscious, he has more presence.
Linklater eschews his usual 1970s' rock back catalogue in favour of souped-up classical music, including scratch versions of suites from Bizet's "Carmen". It's an unusual but stirring use of the music that adds a sense of drama and excitement to many of the ball game scenes. The rest of the score juxtapose traditional instruments with synthesizers and drum machines in an uneasy alliance that neither enhances nor detracts from the movie.
This is a valiant attempt at re-imagining a classic, but ultimately a doomed one. With a more confident and competent child cast, it could have been more engaging and entertaining. But all of the younger cast members can't live up to the showboating antics of Billy Bob Thornton. As a star vehicle it works tolerably well; as a sports movie it fails through lack of detail and as a David and Goliath story, it lacks the emotional punch required to make you care about the characters. One for Billy Bob fans only, methinks.
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