Cameron Diaz

Diaz’s anti-heroine plans to teach for one year at an upscale suburban Chicago middle school to prove her respectability to her rich fiancé’s mother. Perpetually hung over, she snoozes at her desk while showing her well-behaved class movies about teachers who inspire students in the ’hood: Edward James Olmos in Stand and Deliver, Morgan Freeman in Lean on Me, and Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds.

Then the wedding falls through, and so does her summer-vacation Plan B of ensnaring a Chicago Bull in a paternity suit. Once reluctantly back at school in the fall, she complains to an awestruck fellow teacher: “Did you know that all NBA players not only wear a condom, but then they take it with them?”

Plan C is to catch the eye of a naïve coworker with family money (singer Justin Timberlake) by spending $9,700 on breast implants. Timberlake makes a convincing rich dweeb in Bad Teacher. His best lines come when he sincerely rants on a field trip to Abe Lincoln’s log cabin about how much he hates slavery.

When Diaz learns that the teacher whose students get the highest test scores will earn a bonus, she actually starts to explain To Kill a Mockingbird to her class. She quickly realizes that it would be much smarter to just cheat, so she concocts an elaborate ruse to get a copy of the super-secret test ahead of time. (What’s funnier in real life is how shoddy the security is for most statewide “high-stakes” tests, yet teachers often can’t get their students to remember the answers they’ve stolen for them.)

Bad Teacher is an unsettlingly deadpan movie, directed by Jake Kasdan with a flat, alienating affect. There’s almost no musical score except for a few synthesizer notes. Perhaps that’s intended to recall Harold Faltermeyer’s famous scores for Beverly Hills Cop and Fletch at the mid-1980s peak of comedies with heroes who are sociopathic liars.

Diaz’s character is a remarkably un-seductive seductress, the opposite of Marilyn Monroe’s Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. She’s been a hot blonde for a quarter of a century, and by now she feels too entitled and bored to even try to ingratiate.

Eisenberg and Stupnitsky (The Office) also wrote the screenplay for the still unmade Ghostbusters III. Presumably, Bad Teacher is their female version of Bill Murray’s Dr. Peter Venkman: a lazy, fraudulent educator who is, somehow, also a natural leader of men. Diaz can’t quite pull that off, but I don’t know if any actress could. 

I found Bad Teacher mostly hilarious. Then, again, I’m more into jokes about standardized testing than are most moviegoers.