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Bad Teacher

Starring: Cameron Diaz, Justin Timberlake, and Jason Segel
Directed by: Jake Kasdan
Screenplay by: Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg

     We always enjoy making fun of teachers and often they enjoy making fun of their students.  Well, here's one teacher who is rather hard to make fun of.  Why?  Because she's the teacher that we all want.
     Elizabeth Halsey (Cameron Diaz) is a recently divorced, drug using, yet extremely gorgeous middle school teacher who just shows movies in her class and makes her students do nothing.  Sound like the class we all want to take yet?  Her goal, to save up enough money to have her breasts enlarged, and she'll do just about anything to get that money, such as steal the answer key to the state standardized test so her students can get the best scores in the entire county thus making her eligible to receive a large bonus.  Another teacher comes along, Scott Delacorte (Justin Timberlake) who she likes quite a bit.  But there isn't much chemistry between them from the beginning.  The chemistry lies between Delacorte and Ms. Amy Squirrel (Lucy Punch), who Elizabeth is jealous of because she is one of the most loved teachers at the school.  It's a bunch of nonsense and how does it all play out?  Not well.
      From the start, this movie has some, but not much real direction.  Much of the comedy seems out of place and often irrelevant.  All the discernible aspects of the story don't combine into one large picture story at the end.  It's also not clear what's going to happen to Elizabeth at the end of the story.  We are led down a path that we can usually predict what's going to happen to the main character after the movie is over, but we don't know in Bad Teacher. 
      Cameron Diaz delivers a relatively weak performance, as do Justin Timberlake and Jason Segel.  There's not really any excitement between any of them and little chemistry between them, making for a boring performance by all.  Lucy Punch works rather well in her character.  Amy Squirrel is one of the strangest characters I've ever seen in a movie.  The more the movie goes on, the less I like her character.  Often in comedies such as Bad Teacher, there are characters that are pretty annoying and get on my nerve really fast, but Amy is given the most annoying personality I've ever seen in a movie.  She wants to get involved with everything and seems overwhelmed once she gets involved in the activities.  She's the most exciting character the film has, but also the most annoying.
       This is definitely a movie that young people will want to see with their friends.  It's pretty funny, but at times, you'll ask yourself two questions; Why am I seeing this? and where is this story going?  The run time is 92 minutes but it feels like you're in the theater for at least as long as Transformers: Dark of the Moon.  So, if you're going to the movies this 4th of July weekend, think about skipping Bad Teacher.
Bad Teacher hasn't worked to its full potential, so I'm giving it a grade of D+.

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