It has often been said all it takes to change a child’s life is one good teacher since that is the profession that makes all others possible and entrusting the most young and impressionable minds into the hands of these people is a major step forward in defining their future and putting them on the path to success. However, not every educator is willing to put in the effort, as we see in the hilariously irreverent and deeply vulgar Bad  Teacher, in which Jake Kasdan puts together the story of Elizabeth Halsey, possibly the world’s worst teacher based on the fact that she not only despises her profession but shows minimal hesitation when it comes to inadvertently corrupting the minds of her students, who are the victims of her extraordinary levels of laziness. Kasdan, who is usually a very reliable director, was the right person to helm this film, based on his penchant for these often off-the-wall, potty-mouthed comedies that push the boundaries of good taste and offer an endless cavalcade of vulgarity and inappropriate humour that are not for everyone, but will certainly appeal to those who enjoy this particular brand of off-colour humour. It’s by no means a perfect film. Still, no one involved in it seemed to approach the material as if it was anything more than a bawdy, eccentric dark comedy about despicable beings trying to take advantage of one another due to their delusions of grandeur. Not a film that has aged particularly well, as well as featuring a few shortcomings in both the narrative and its execution that prevent it from reaching its full potential, Bad Teacher is still a lot of fun, and is exactly the kind of outrageous comedy that constitutes a vital form of artistic escapism – its neither serious nor particularly original, but its still wickedly entertaining in all the ways that matter.

One of the reasons Bad Teacher has retained some degree of cultural cache is because of the presence of Cameron Diaz as the titular anti-hero, particularly since this came towards the end of her film career before she announced her retirement (on which she has subsequently reneged, with her return to the screen being imminent), and where she was still able to masterfully lead a film on nothing but the sheer magnetism she brought to every project. Diaz is perhaps the most charismatic actor of her generation – even in the most dismal project, she manages to be the most valuable performer and she always delivers exceptional work, even when the material may not be the most interesting or worthy of her talents. Bad Teacher is very smart insofar as it is built entirely around her performance, and the majority of the film can be considered to be tailor-made to Diaz’s talents as a whole, particularly in how this character oscillates between congenial and foul-mouthed, showcasing Diaz’s exceptional range and impeccable comedic timing. It’s one of her best performances, even if the surrounding film doesn’t always make it seem this way. The rest of the cast ranges from good to merely serviceable – Lucy Punch is probably the only other genuinely great performance, and she proves to be quite an effective villain, stealing several scenes and being a worthy adversary for the protagonist. Jason Segel is very charming and the always delightful Phyllis Smith is once again having the most fun out of anyone in the cast. Unfortunately, Justin Timberlake was cast in the film as the love interest, and he fares about as well as we’d expect, with his tendency to always do too much and play to the rafters being more obvious here than ever before. Yet, nothing else quite matters when we have the film being so masterfully anchored by Diaz, whose performance is enough to make the film worth our time.

Bad Teacher is not a film that is intended to have a message. If anything, it was created to directly contradict those hackneyed portrayals of dedicated teachers who manage to defy the odds by rallying troubled and mischievous pupils through the art of inspiring and educating. If anything, the entire premise of this film can be summarized as simply being about a situation where it was the teacher who was the problem rather than the students. The film does get quite a bit of mileage out of this idea, with the majority of the plot being centred around the increasingly immoral ways the protagonist uses her power as a teacher to get her way, manipulating and extorting anyone who crosses her path, all for the sake of her vanity and desire to be the most dominant person in whatever room she’s in. Yet, beneath the surface, some terrific ideas do add a lot more nuance to the film than we may initially expect. This mainly includes depictions of the importance of teaching – it helps that every other teacher at the school in which the film takes place is committed to their job and adores teaching (therefore it never becomes a situation where the entire film devolves into the rivalry between teachers and students – that’s a far too limited and cliched approach that would have removed a lot of this film’s lustre) – as well as having a moral message about doing what is right rather than what is easy, and how the only way to succeed is through honesty. Neither of these themes is bespoke or entirely exclusive to this film, but they do lay a conceptual foundation that proves that it isn’t nearly as vapid as it may appear at a cursory glance, and while it is far from complex, there are glimmers of potential scattered throughout.

Unfortunately, there are flaws to this film and it doesn’t quite manage to rise to match its star in terms of the dedication to the material. Bad Teacher is not a poor film, but it does tend to falter in a few ways, particularly in terms of maintaining our attention. For the first hour, we’re confronted with an endless stream of hilarious moments, and they’re certainly entertaining enough to keep us invested. However, when it comes time to tie up all the loose ends and offer resolution to the dozen or so plot points that it opened, the film is far less effective. It does try to do a sweeping conclusion to all the central ideas, but it feels quite lazy after a while, especially since the film loses its steam midway through, and never quite manages to recover. Bad Teacher isn’t even an example of a broad comedy that runs for too long – it’s a decent 97 minutes, so unless it was willing to shave down its already paper-thin resolution, we weren’t likely going to get a film that fared much better, at least not with the several plot threads that seem important at first but ultimately prove to not go anywhere of value. The attempts to add depth are half-baked and ineffectual and don’t add much to a story that didn’t necessarily need this kind of approach to be effective, but at least needed some degree of consistency to prevent it from falling apart entirely. There are far too many elements that are left open-ended and without any clear resolution, and while the film isn’t forced to answer any of them, the overall impression we get is that this is something that deserves a bit more time to develop its ideas so it doesn’t feel so half-hearted when it comes time to conclude everything. The lack of cohesion is this film’s biggest flaw and the main reason it loses so much of its impact.

By the end of the film, we’ve gotten exactly what we expected from Bad Teacher ­– a very amusing comedy that is not afraid to be vulgar, and which proudly flaunts its bawdy sense of humour, which exists solely to stir a reaction it is its not surprising that the film was co-written by Gene Stupnitsky, whose subsequent credits include directing Good Boys and No Hard Feelings, which continue this streak of off-the-wall, foul-mouthed comedies that are about as subtle as a brick to the cranium), rather than to offer any sense of commentary or subversive conversation. The main attraction here is Diaz, who commits entirely to the role and delivers very strong work that is much better than the film that surrounds her, and the scenes where she is at her peak are some of the best in her career, at least in showing her irresistible charisma and undeniable comedic timing, which work together perfectly. Bad Teacher is not particularly serious, and it earns the exact reaction we would expect. There’s nothing else behind this film, with the lack of underlying meaning or additional context being predictable to the point where we genuinely cannot be disappointed that this film is exactly what it promises to be on the surface. Beyond all of this, Bad Teacher is simply a fun, off-the-wall comedy that does exactly what was required and nothing more, which is expected and hardly anything that can be held against this otherwise very entertaining and outrageously funny comedy.