Seeing as the last decade or so has given us Bad Santa, a Bad News Bears remake, Bad Teacher, and Bad Grandpa, movies that have the word “Bad” in the title and that feature a cartoonishly mean main character can probably now be considered an official comedic sub-genre. The latest, Bad Words, comes to us from director/star Jason Bateman, and it sees him playing a foul-mouthed and bitter 40-year-old named Guy who finds a loophole in a national spelling bee’s rules that allow him to sign up as a contestant—you know, even though spelling bees are supposed to be for kids. Seeing as he’s an overall bad person, it seems to be Guy’s plan to use his superior intellect to make a mockery of the competition, and to crush the dreams of all the little nerds who worked so hard to get there.
The thing that Bad Words doesn’t get that most of the “Bad” movies that came before it did is how to make the man character likable, despite their behavior. In all of those other movies, the mean character in question was a loser, someone who had hit rock bottom and was aiming their barbs at people perceived as being above them. Bateman’s character here seems much too smart and together to really be considered a loser, and he’s aiming most of his insults at children. Like those that came before him, you can describe Guy with words like cranky, crotchety, and cantankerous, but he’s the first of his kind that can also be described as smarmy, snarky, and smug. There’s no joy in watching someone who holds a position of power being mean to those beneath them. It just comes off as being cruel, and kind of a drag to sit through. And while most of these characters have been played as broad cartoons in the past, with a heightened reality that makes their behavior more palatable, Bateman plays Guy far too naturally for us not to take him seriously, which leads to some off-putting shifts in tone. Bateman never digs deep enough into Guy’s pathos for him to be dramatically effective, and his delivery is far too dour and dry for him to be all that effective comedically either.
The movie does start to get engaging somewhere about halfway through, once you realize that the real reason Guy has inserted himself into the spelling bee and the real reason he’s being a total jerk to everyone is being built up into a mystery, but once you finally get your answers, they’re just too unsatisfying and senseless for Bad Words to redeem itself as any sort of character study. It’s clear that the film thinks it has presented a moment of emotional catharsis by the time the end credits roll, but from this side of the screen the final few scenes don’t end up resonating at all. Even when all the cards are out on the table, you’re still just left asking yourself, “So what?”
