Directed by: Jake Kasdan
Starring: Cameron Diaz, Lucy Punch, Justin Timberlake, Jason Segel
Rating: R

Justin Timberlake and Cameron Diaz star in Bad Teacher. (Courtesy photo)

It's a well-known fact that many movie producers look first at the moneymaking ability of a script before they check if it's any good. If you want proof, look no further than Bad Teacher. Here's a movie with nothing new to say, few good jokes, and decent (not good, necessarily) acting. And yet, it brought in more than $30 million last weekend, probably because having a few celebrities in the lead roles can save a mediocre movie. Bad Teacher really pushes that truth to its limit, though.

Elizabeth Halsey (Cameron Diaz, Gangs of New York) is your average gold-digging, couldn't-care-less, rebellious middle school teacher. Ready to leave the world of snot-nosed children behind and marry a rich man, she gets quite a surprise when he calls the wedding off. She is forced to return to her teaching job, surrounded by losers like Russell (Jason Segel, Forgetting Sarah Marshall), the gym teacher who keeps asking her out, and Amy Squirrel (Lucy Punch, Dinner for Schmucks), the overly perky and overzealous teacher across the hall. The job becomes bearable again when she meets the wealthy (albeit empty-headed) new teacher, Scott (Justin Timberlake, The Social Network). In order to get his attention, Elizabeth decides to get plastic surgery. She embarks upon a series of shameless attempts to raise money for the surgery, including blackmail, cheating on standardized tests, flaunting her body for anyone willing to look, stealing, and so on. But the closer she gets to her surgery, the closer Scott is getting to Amy. And when Scott and Amy start dating, Elizabeth has to balance her fundraising efforts with equally devious acts of sabotage on her obnoxiously peppy nemesis.

What this movie lacks in sophistication or originality it makes up for with … well, not much. To be fair, the script isn't as bad as it could be; at least it's consistent. Writers Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg (no relation, thank goodness), of TV's The Office, are either themselves deprived or think that the American male population is collectively deprived of contact with the opposite sex. Bad Teacher plays out like a bizarre fantasy, but with less sex than you'd think, and a whole slew of raunchy jokes that don't quite hit. Jake Kasdan (Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story) directs in the most straightforward of ways, with virtually nothing standing out as particularly good or particularly bad in his directorial style.

It's the star of this movie that saves it from being completely generic. Cameron Diaz is comfortable and appealingly appalling as our anti-heroine, although we can't sympathize with her too much, given how irritating it is to see pretty people complaining that they're not pretty enough. Nevertheless, she brings energy and attitude to the role, both of which are very much needed for this movie to work. And Lucy Punch plays her part correctly, by which I mean she annoys the heck out of us with her incessant cheeriness. Punch and Diaz provide much of the movie's conflict and content; actually, we see surprisingly little of Timberlake and Segel. Segel, in yet another raunchy comedy, tries to play a loser but comes across as too cool, whereas Timberlake tries to play the cool new guy but comes across as a loser. Of all of them, Timberlake disappoints the most, if only because I had hoped he would start to take his acting career more seriously after his good performance in The Social Network; the issue here isn't even so much that he picked a bad movie to be in (although it is a bad one), but that he didn't perform that well in it. Maybe next time.

I have any number of puns I could use to sum up how I feel about Bad Teacher. I give it a C-; this movie tests your patience; it lacks class. And so on. But I won't use puns, since that would be low-grade comedy. Chances are, you've seen Bad Teacher already, just with different actors and in a different setting. It's our dose of crude humor and revealing clothing for the moment, and it will be replaced soon enough by another, equally generic movie. You might want to see it now, since it will be quickly forgotten. But then again, you might not, and I don't blame you.

Danny Eisenberg is a 2010 graduate of the Bromfield School and is currently a student at the University of Pennsylvania.