By J.E.
I can’t help it: I’m a sucker for sports movies. Even though I know every sports-themed film follows essentially the same formula, I can’t keep away from them. I’ll watch movies about any sport out there, from baseball to hockey to football. Heck, I even watch soccer movies, and I absolutely hate soccer! That’s not to say that I like all the sports movies I watch, but I just can’t resist watching them. So I knew I’d eventually get around to Bad News Bears, a remake of the 1976 Walter Matthau film.
Plot summary (with possible spoilers): Billy Bob Thornton stars as Morris Buttermaker, a washed-up former minor league pitcher whose claim to fame was lasting 2/3 of an inning for the Seattle Mariners. He’s now an exterminator, and is more interested in women and alcohol than in baseball. Nevertheless, Buttermaker agrees to coach a Little League team because he could use the extra money.
The interesting thing about Buttermaker’s team (the Bears, of course) is that they’re only in the league because Mrs. Whitewood (played by Marcia Gay Harden) sued the league to get in. As a result, the Bears are made up of a diverse group of misfits who don’t even seem to care about baseball at all. There’s the foul-mouthed Tanner Boyle (Timmy Deters), who constantly picks on teammates and gets into fights with everyone, including the entire 6th grade. There’s Lupus (Tyler Patrick Jones), who has zero skills to speak of, daydreams in right field, and spouts off with totally random sentences every once in a while. They even have a kid named Hooper (Troy Hooper), who is confined to a wheelchair.
As expected from such a ragtag group, the Bears suck at the beginning of the season. Buttermaker decides to forfeit the first game after just one inning because his team can’t get anyone out. After that, the kids call a meeting and decide to quit, but Buttermaker won’t let them. He decides what they really need is a couple of key players, so first he goes out and recruits his estranged daughter Amanda (Sammie Kane Kraft) to pitch for the team. After that, Amanda convinces Kelly Leak (Jeffrey Davies), the long-haired dirt bike-riding hellion with a canon for an arm and a sweet home run swing, to join the Bears.
With the addition of these two new players, the Bears suddenly start doing a lot better. In fact, they win a lot of games and make it all the way to the championship game against the Yankees, the very team that embarrassed them at the start of the season. If you’ve seen the original, then you already know how the championship game ends; if you haven’t, I won’t spoil it for you.
My Reaction: I saw the original Bad News Bears several times when I was a kid, and I think this remake did a pretty good job of following the storyline rather closely. In fact, so much of the movie was the same that I wonder why the filmmakers bothered with a remake at all. I’ve always believed that the only time a movie should be remade is if the director has a different vision of the story and can add something more to it. Just bringing us the same movie with different actors doesn’t really make much sense.
I thought Billy Bob Thornton was too nice as Buttermaker. He couldn’t pull off the distant, cold, disinterested coach the way Matthau could, and that really affected my whole take on the movie. Plus, Thornton had terrible form when he was hitting ground balls to the kids for infield practice. You can tell he never played baseball before!
I thought the kids in the cast were okay (and, unlike Thornton, they all had great baseball technique) but none were all that memorable. One of the best things about the original movie was how all the kids had such huge personalities that really stood out. I just didn’t get the same vibe from this newer version.
Overall, Bad News Bears is a watchable remake, but it simply doesn’t compare to the original. I give it 5.0 stars out of 10 and suggest you go with the 1976 version if you want to see a kids baseball movie.
