Usually, the mere presence of the great Jason Bateman in an otherwise calamitous comedy — The Ex, The Switch, The Change-Up, Identity Thief, I could sadly go on and on — makes the failed jokes go down a little easier. He’s coasted through one clunker after another because of his inherent likeability; it was the one thing, in many of those films, that made them worth watching.
Bad Words might be the first Jason Bateman film without that one thing. He plays against type as a crass, mean-spirited, dream-crushing monster named Guy Trilby, a 40-year-old product warranty proofreader (a made-up “movie job,” if ever there was one) who, through a loophole in the fine print of a national spelling bee, decides to vie against 10-year-old competitors, to the disgust of parents and bee directors everywhere (handled differently, one imagines the seed of a fine Christopher Guest film with the same scenario).
He’s sponsored by an enterprising reporter, Jenny Widgeon (Kathryn Hahn), who agrees to fund his esoteric quest in return for an interview with him — though he constantly rebuffs her efforts to obtain it. Guy’s motive eventually surfaces and is intended to absolve him of his reign of destruction from the previous two-thirds of Bad Words, hence the movie’s tagline: “The end justifies the mean.”
And boy, is it mean. Bateman, who directed the movie, and his screenwriter Andrew Dodge, try in vain to replicate the guttural nastiness of Bad Santa, contriving a litany of R-rated deluges for Guy to vomit in the direction of his antagonists — children, parents, Jenny, pretty much everyone who isn’t him. If we eventually grow to like him a little bit, it’s only because Bateman and Dodge have created a world in which all of the establishment figures are morally bankrupt and/or ethically dubious, from Jenny, who sleeps her way toward her story, to Allison Janney’s tournament director, who rigs the competition, to Philip Baker Hall’s tournament founder, whose own baggage spills onto the tournament floor as the film winds down. In this nest of vipers, we hang with the viper we know, I guess.
All of this cynicism would be fine if the film were actually funny; instead, it’s just nasty, drawing its yuks entirely from expletives and schadenfreude, with helpless, pint-sized victims almost always the butt of the joke. Morality aside, Bad Words’ ultimate sin is that it’s entirely conventional in its formal and narrative decisions, petering toward an obvious, vanilla denouement quicker than you can spell AXIOMATIC.
Please, movie: If you’ve just slapped us around for 75 minutes, don’t buy us an ice cream and expect us to love you.
BAD WORDS. Director: Jason Bateman; Cast: Jason Bateman, Kathryn Hahn, Rohan Chand, Allison Janney, Rachael Harris, Philip Baker Hall; Distributor: Focus; Rated: R; Opens Friday at most area theaters.