Went to the new Jason Bateman comedy Bad Words… it’s the one about the adult who finds a loophole to enter a spelling bee. The movie is wrong in the way that Bad Santa and, to a lesser extent, Bad Teacher were wrong and is clearly trying to be part of the unofficial fraternity of raunchy, filthy “Bad” comedies. And it IS raunchy and filthy and they do spend a lot of time trying to make the audience laugh in a “I can’t believe they did that” sort of way… and it worked for me in Bad Santa and less so in Bad Teacher… but it didn’t work here. The problem wasn’t that I was offended at flipping the bird to a 10 year old boy, putting ketchup on the chair of 12 year old girl to convince her she had her period so she’ll quit the bee, or calling the Indian kid Slumdog and taking him to see a hooker (she flashes her breasts at him only) the problem is that it was never as funny as it was trying so hard to be. I think that it was trying too hard that it backfired. I was, frankly, just bored by the whole thing. It’s not an incompetently made film but it is a failure on a script level and just not worth seeing. That said, comedy is subjective… maybe I’m wrong and you’ll laugh at everything. Or maybe you’re the kind of person who thought Bad Santa was crude, disgusting, and completely unfunny… in which case, this isn’t as “bad” but you probably would still think it’s crude, disgusting, and unfunny.

Score: 65