The Bad News Bears

The Bad News Bears is the film that launched a thousand imitators. Every sports movie about a youth league team full of smart alecks, often trained by a coach who has lost his or her way in life, owes its existence to this film. However, the uniqueness of the movie when it was released masked a number of structural flaws that are less ignorable for a modern audience.

For a movie that originated the components of a filmmaking formula, The Bad News Bears doesn’t get its own formula right. While I acknowledge that formulaic movies are often bad, and that that word is correctly levied as an insult against works that are overly derivative, safe, or pandering, formulas also exist for a reason. It can be trite when a romantic comedy follows all the beats of the genre to an absolute tee, but on the other hand it takes a particularly deft touch to make a romantic comedy where the main couple doesn’t get together in the end. The Bad News Bears doesn’t have that deft of a touch.

The classic setup is for the coach and the kids to each teach each other something. For example, the coach teaches the kids the fundamentals of the game and a lesson on the value of hard work and in exchange the kids teach the coach that their life still has meaning and purpose. In The Bad News Bears, nothing like this happens. The kids learn a little baseball and not much else. The coach learns a half-hearted message about the value of playing the game for fun and not just to win, but the movie also undercuts this message constantly.

Another classic setup is for the antagonist team’s coach to be the kind of victory obsessed, hard driving jerk of a man who is living, or reliving, a fantasy of sports accomplishment vicariously through his kid or his team. This exists in The Bad News Bears, to an extent, but the Bear’s coach is just as big a tool as the antagonist. One slaps a kid for his pitching, the other throws water in a kids face for not following the game plan. One tells his players to walk a team’s best hitter even though it is considered against the spirit of their junior league, the other tells his best fielder to not let anyone else on the team do anything so they can win. One abuses his son to the point where he tries to throw a game, the other won’t acknowledge a kid’s need for a father figure and insists that their relationship is purely transactional. Sure, the Bears’ coach finally comes around to not being such a jackass, but it happens so late in the movie that it hardly makes up for the mountain of bad behavior that led up to that moment. And even then, only some of his jackassery is addressed.

This creates an uncanny valley effect where the movie is so close to something both familiar and functional that it seems all the more odd in its deviation from it. It is so very like the heartwarming kids sports movies it almost certainly inspired, from Hardball to The Big Green. Yet it is so much more bitter, cynical, and rough around the edges that it fails to tell a good underdog story, fails to tell a personal transformation story for either the kids or the coach, and fails to deliver either sporting thrills or a valuable message. Instead, it mostly seems to lean on the kids and their wisecracking or the irascible coach and his sniping at the other parents to carry the film with humor.

This style of humor has its moments, especially if you like Walter Matthau’s trademark deadpan delivery, but overall it didn’t really click with me. The unexpectedness of a small child saying a wildly inappropriate thing, from salty cusses to racial slurs, doesn’t hold up on a number of levels. For starters, society is much more lax about language and so having kids swear as they do in the film is not that different from how many kids of my generation remember speaking to each other in the school yard. The curse words are now mostly toothless and the slurs have become profane beyond the reach of this kind of humor. Since the former is no longer shocking and the latter is so tricky to joke about, the movie is substantially less funny than it might have been when it was released. But even in the context in which it was released, this gimmick wears out its welcome fast. Subversions of cultural norms are good for a laugh, but there is so little else to provide humor that it ends up feeling hacky by the end.

It is easy to see all the pieces of why this movie became so often imitated, but they don’t really gel correctly here. The Bad News Bears is a redemption story without redemption, an object lesson in competitiveness that contradicts itself, and a comedy whose comedic sensibilities are the opposite of timeless. Despite that less than glowing conclusion, the film isn’t bad so much as it is disappointing. By the end, it didn’t feel like the movie knew what it was trying to say and without that point of cohesion, it is just a lot of dated, off-color jokes and wasted potential.

Would Recommend: If you want to see the granddaddy of all misfit kids sports movies.

Would Not Recommend: If you’ve seen the 2005 remake and were curious if the original is markedly better (they are honestly quite similar).