The Best Thing You Can Say About "Bad Teacher" is It's Not the Worst Movie Ever

Cameron Diaz, Jason Segel, Justin Timberlake

The makers of Bad Teacher clearly decided to phone this thing in, doing the absolute bare minimum required to have people call their film a "movie comedy."

So in their honor, I'm going to phone in this review. I'm not even going to make a lot of dumb puns about the movie not "making the grade."

Okay, okay, I'll work harder at this review than they did at this movie (but still no bad puns!).

The truth is Bad Teacher isn't one of those painfully unfunny, seemingly-badly-ad-libbed and usually-based-on-a-stupid-Saturday-Night-Live-skit comedies.

It's just completely forgettable – vaguely amusing at its best moments, eye-roll-inducing at its worst.

And as usual, it's hard to find much interesting to say about a movie that doesn't have anything interesting to say.

Elisabeth Halsey (Cameron Diaz) is a very bad teacher: she doesn't bother learning her students' names, she plays movies all day, she drinks on the job. Then again, she has no reason to be a good teacher. She started doing it for all the "right" reasons – short hours, summers off, no accountability – but only until she could land a rich husband to marry.

In other words, she's an even worse human being than she is a teacher: she lies, cheats, steals, and she's racist, superficial, conniving, and judgmental.

When her fiance realizes what a horrible person she is, he dumps her. With no prospects, she is forced to go back to teaching for another year. But at least she has a goal: if she can raise (or steal) $10,000, she'll have the money she needs to get breast implants, which will surely land her the rich husband of her dreams.

On one hand, I live for black comedies — the blacker the better — and I appreciated that the movie made Elizabeth pretty irredeemable. And since it's Cameron Diaz coming off a long string of box office disappointments, I was prepared for the worst – but she was actually a bit better than usual (*cough* The Box *cough*).

Diaz and Phyllis Smith

But in the end, I decided this was just another American movie comedy that tries to be "edgy" by having its main character be a selfish, immature adult-child at the beginning – only to see them completely redeemed by the end. How does she get from Point A to Point B? Well, there's a very clunky subplot with a kid, but it's mostly because the movie wants her to (and because she's Cameron Diaz).

I guess it's noteworthy this time because it's a woman.

Eric Stonestreet has a small part as Elizabeth's macho loser of a roommate – the joke is that it's the opposite of the character he plays on Modern Family – and that's kinda fun to see.

Justin Timberlake plays a rich teacher who Elizabeth has her designs on and who's also a bad singer-songwriter (ha ha). Later, he has a "dry humping" scene with her that ends with the expected wet stain on the front of his pants. Timberlake tries very hard, but he's simply not an actor.

Jason Segel, as the poor P.E. teacher who loves Elizabeth but she can't be bothered with, has what Timberlake does not: movie charisma. But it's extremely hard to see what he sees in Elizabeth, except her obvious good looks, which makes him superficial.

Most of the genuine laughs come from an actress named Phyllis Smith, who plays a socially inept teacher named Lynn. But Lucy Punch, who plays perky Miss Squirrel (and who also starred in The Class), studied at the Crispin Glover School of Acting – waaaaay too over-the-top.

Hollywood has made worse comedies. But still I can't imagine why anyone would go to this one.