.: Roberts' Reviews - Movie Reviews :.

The following review was submitted by Nick Lam, a young aspiring film aficionado who e-mailed gregsrants.com looking for the opportunity to contribute reviews to the site offering a 16-year old's point of view. Look for further reviews from Nick in Nick's Niche coming soon to this web site.

In all honesty, I never saw the original 'Bad News Bears' film. I don't know if that's a bad thing but I'm guessing it is due to the amount of people who have been telling me about it lately. In fact, I think I should have seen it, because I really don't like the recent remake of the film.

I didn't want to see this, I had no expectations at all and I was completely turned off once I saw that it was another coach-player relationship movie. Ever since I saw 'Kicking & Screaming', the idea of another coach-player relationship film could give me a brain tumor.

The film follows the story of a low life, little-league baseball coach, Morris Buttermaker (Billy Bob Thornton). He is assigned the worst team possible, a group of foul mouthed misfits who know more about anything than baseball. I'm sure you could guess the rest from here, coach befriends players, coach regains father-child relationship and coach leads the team to little league greatness.

I saw this film for one reason and one reason only, Billy Bob Thornton, one of the funniest actors out there. He played a drunk in 'Bad Santa' which I though was hilarious, what was there to lose in 'Bad News Bears'? I mean, he's playing a drunk again, so I'm sure to laugh right?

Thornton is indeed effective and gave me some great laughs throughout the first half of the film, but unfortunately, his antics can only be funny for so long. As Thornton's light dies down, the kids on the team start giving a few laughs, note that there were only a few. All of those laughs came from Tanner (Timmy Deters). He provided the best laughs for me while he cursed more than any average fifth grader.

I usually hate film sub plots. A sub plot in this film is about Buttermaker, regaining a relationship with an old daughter in law. Buttermaker wants her on the team due to her killer pitching. I thought this took away from a lot of the laughs in the film and could have been shaved off to bring the film's running time down. The film could have been 15 minutes shorter and a lot better if they took out all the stereotypical low life, down on his luck, alcoholic Buttermaker scenes.

I hated the ending; it had the typical sports ending. If you don't know what I mean; it had your normal last second win/lose situation ending. I'm a big sports fan, I know that sort of crap never happens in sports. You know what I'd really like in a movie? If the home team blows the hell out of the opposing team in the championship game. Enough of this winning and losing at the last second crap.

'Bad News Bears' ends up feeling like an excuse to bring Thornton back as a drunk. You take the Bad Santa and surround him with kids like this and you lose the dark humor of 'Bad Santa' and get a film that resembles 'Kicking & Screaming', which wasn't that much itself.