'Bad Words' — 'Bad Santa' at the spelling bee
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
[Grade: C-] Jason Bateman's film is never as transgressively funny as it thinks it is.
City Paper grade: C-
Making his feature directorial debut, Jason Bateman uses Bad Santa like a pair of training wheels. Bateman himself plays the foul-mouthed misanthrope whose belligerence is tempered by the constant presence of a relentlessly sunny kid sidekick. Here he’s an angry 40-year-old who takes advantage of a loophole in the rules of a national spelling bee to compete against elementary students. The actor/director takes giddy delight in taunting young children, lobbing grenades of vitriol from behind his nice-guy facade. But Andrew Dodge’s script only has the one nasty trick up its sleeve, and before long the spectacle of watching Bateman act inappropriately loses its novelty and the film is never as transgressively funny as it thinks it is. There’s no real consistency to the story: Bateman’s character is obviously the smartest guy in the room, but resorts to underhanded tactics to rattle his competition — whatever it takes to shoehorn in another barb. Once his actual motivations are revealed, everything goes predictably squishy. The need for a weepy backstory is taken as a given; after spending 90 minutes reveling in someone’s bad behavior, after all, it’s important to stress that he didn’t mean it.
