Bad Words: Plot Pitfalls and Character Flaws

Reviewing movies is such a drag sometimes. What is the protocol for when you like a movie so much, but know deep down in your cynical heart that it won’t be much of a success?

Is it like loving Applebee’s half off appetizers? Such a deal, but do I really want my love for Applebee’s to be eternally planted on the internet for everyone to see?

Such is the case with Jason Bateman’s, Bad Words.

In addition to making his first directorial debut of a major motion picture, Bateman also plays Guy Trillby: A genius borderline sociopath, with a potty mouth from hell and a heart of gold.

Guy Trillby is a troubled genius, who sets out to win, and thus ruin, a spelling bee for initially undisclosed reasons. Since he’s never graduated eighth grade, and has a sponsor from an equally troubled journalist, he is legally allowed to enter the contest.

While doing so, he plays ingenious pranks on little middle school dweebs and launches amazing profanity laced verbal assaults on pretentious soccer moms, and I absolutely adore him for that. What can I say?  I love a man who can describe a vagina in ways I’ve never heard before.

But like the ambiance of Applebee’s, the movie itself kind of ruins the half off appetizers – I mean Guy Trillby – and a large part of that has to do with the story telling, by Andrew Dodge.

Now, I clearly am not the sort of film-goer who takes in my movies in with a top hat and monocle while sipping herbal tea with my pinky out, but there does need to be a solid ground of plot and theme that a movie’s characters can stand on while they entertain us. If not, then the murky waters of a terribly crafted story become too annoying to wade through even the best of performances.

Dodge and Bateman offer us a physical plot that really provides no obstacles for our hero, and thus, makes the story more about why he’s on the journey he’s on. Indeed, they use a monologue that reminds you of this throughout the movie; that the why is more important than the what.

Guy Trillby wants to bang a chick? She bangs him, even if he’s a horrible person to her and she “hates” him. Oh, you don’t want Guy to be in the spelling be? Yep, he can be in it and there’s nothing you can do about it that he didn’t already preplan for. Oh, you want to stump him with a tough word? Guy literally knows how to spell ever word in the English dictionary. The only thing you’re left to be interested in is why he’s doing what he’s doing, which you figure out a few scenes before the movie actually decides to reveal it.  And then, Guy literally just decides ‘I guess I’ll stop now,’ without any reason for doing so.

He spends the entire movie tricking chubby insecure middle school girls that they’ve just had their period in front of everyone, being a complete and utter prick to parents, who are just trying to protect their children, and manipulating a broken woman into having sex with him in a hotel utility closet, before inexplicably deciding to not be a jerk to the one and only person in the entire movie whose conveniently happens to be more rotten than he is. The whole thing comes across as a sort of half assed attempt to give the movie a heart and soul, which ruins the tone of humor.

So, if you’re sitting at home late at night and scrolling through your Netflix account to find an entertaining movie to fall asleep to and stumble upon a Jason Bateman movie in which he plays a dirty old man trying to win a spelling bee, then by all means, enjoy. But if you’ve got fifteen dollars and you’re looking for something to do on a weekend night I suggest you skip this flick and go see Chastity at the The Play Pen; she won’t give you some sob story about a being a former neglected school boy, and she has 1,000 times the mouth on her than Jason Bateman does.