Bad News Bears

To start with, I LOVE the original Bad News Bears. I would say it's probably one of my favorite movies of all time. Generally with me, if there is baseball in the movie, and particularly if it isn't ruined with a stupid love story, I tend to be satisfied with said movie. So I was pretty much set to be happy with this one.

That said, I still like the original Bears better. Remakes tend to work best when the filmmaker does not try to flat-out recreate the original movie with a new cast. And when the cast of the original you are remaking is as good as the cast was for the original Bears, you're setting yourself up for failure going this route.

There's no way to replace people like Walter Matthau, Tatum O'Neal, Chris Barnes, and Jackie Earle Haley. The only two characters who I felt like stayed in the mold of the original movie versions but were played equally well or better were Lupus (the weird kid, or as Tanner calls him in both versions, a "booger-eatin' moron") and Engleberg (the fat, obnoxious catcher). The 2005 Lupus is more than just the quiet loner who everyone declares is weird (aside from his shyness, there didn't seem to be much wrong with him in the 1976 version except that he didn't wipe his nose very often); in this version, the things he says are just plain nuts, and the kid playing him, Tyler Patrick Jones, pulls it off really well. Engleberg, played in this version by a kid named Brandon Cragg, is pretty much the same as the original version of the character and played just as well (though this time around, Engleberg is "on Atkins").

Sammi Kraft as Amanda and Jeff Davies as Kelly never escape the shadows of their charismatic predecessors. Tatum O'Neal and Jackie Earle Haley had personality out the wazoo in these roles, and the two new actors are kind of boring. Timmy Deters does ok as Tanner Boyle, my favorite of the Bears from the original movie. His best moments were the ones that were a departure from the original, like when he starts tackling Yankees as they pass him at shortstop on their way around the bases. But he, too, is lacking the charisma of Chris Barnes.

Billy Bob Thornton is ok. The problem is that he did such a good job being a creep that I didn't buy him at the end as a decent guy and good coach.

This movie was at its best when it was breaking free of the original and doing new things. Greg Kinnear's character was a hoot, and one of the best things about the movie. He took the character and made it his own. Of the rest of the kids, one of my favorites was K.C. Harris as Ahmad Abdul Rahim. This character was very different from the one in the original; the 1976 version was obsessed with being Hank Aaron, while humor in this version is derived from the fact that Ahmad's favorite ball player is Mark McGwire, a white guy. K.C. Harris is one kid I would expect to see acting in more movies in the future because he seems very at ease with himself, a natural actor. The other kid I expect to see go on to bigger and better things is Jeffrey Tedmori, playing another of the new characters, Garo, who is the most interesting of the kid characters in the film.

Like I said, this is a baseball movie, so I was happy, but it did not live up to the quality of its predecessor. I think that if Linklater had played looser with his source material and made a film that captured the spirit of the original without trying to remake it so closely, I would have been happier with it. Cause when it comes down to it, there's no reason to watch this one instead of the original.