Bad Teacher

Cameron Diaz plays Elizabeth Halsey, a vain, greedy, sexy woman who, for some reason, has become the busty bad teacher. The movie opens on the last day of school after Elizabeth’s first year of teaching. After just one year, Elizabeth is set to leave teaching for good. She races home in her Mercedes Benz to find her wealthy boyfriend and his mother waiting for her with bad news: she’s dumped. Instead of marrying the man who could take care of her exorbitant financial needs and living happily ever after, she finds herself back at the middle school, becoming “across the hall mates” with Amy Squirrel, complete opposite of Elizabeth: she’s a goody-good teacher that is always trying to overachieve. Both women set their sights on the new substitute teacher – Scott Delacorte (Justin Timberlake) – who happens to be incredibly wealthy. Along with pursuing Scott, Elizabeth is also trying to find the money to afford breast enhancement surgery. She figures that with a bigger chest, Scott will fall for her in an instance.



Bad Teacher is little more than a story of what one woman will do to get bigger breasts. In order to add the smallest minutia of depth, the filmmakers add in Jason Segel’s character: a gym teacher who is attracted to Elizabeth. This addition is so weak, though, that Bad Teacher would have been better off without it. If the characters were more fleshed out, and some reasons were given for his or her actions, this thin layer of depth may have had a stronger impact. As it is, there are a lot of one-dimensional characters that are difficult to care about.



RATING* 7/10