Bad Teacher is what feminism mixed with movies amounts to: depicting women as equally daft, vacant and moronic as men. Figuring that the premise of the picture might foster a fun, turnabout exercise in what happens when the teacher is like an apathetic and airheaded student, I had low expectations for Bad Teacher and it sputtered, choked and collapsed. It’s not humorous, despite a few laugh lines and an odd teacher character played by someone named Lucy Punch, and it seems to exist primarily to convince people to visit Illinois. Cameron Diaz portrays a golddigging teacher slut who pines for Justin Timberlake and makes jokes about bestiality, incest, and racism along the way to becoming a better teacher. There are several titillating scenes, including frontal nudity, and none of the situational comedy works well. Bad Teacher barely reaches bad status, in either sense, and it limps past 90 minutes. What else would one expect from a movie whose co-writer boasts that he and his writing partner “like the idea of adults being mean to kids as a warped sense of comedy.” Not to be outgrossed, the director belongs to crude conservative jokester Judd Apatow’s clique, responsible for the de facto anti-abortion movie Knocked Up that hurled a trend of raunchy traditionalism in movies (Superbad, The Hangover, anything with Ben Stiller or Adam Sandler) that play like a bunch of rabbis sitting around smoking pot, farting and telling titty jokes. Bad Teacher is as generic as its title.
