| Paramount Pictures | Release Date: April 7, 1976 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
14
Mixed:
1
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
The Bad News Bears is about kids, but they're real kids, not bland, cutesy, lovable Hollywood moppets. These pre-teens are unwashed, obnoxious, cynical, fractious, gleefully profane, unrepentantly juvenile, and deeply untrusting of any sort of authority — in other words, just like the kids you probably played team sports with.
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Matthau is at his curmudgeonly best and Ritchie (at the time considered one of Hollywood's best directors) brings his usual sharp eye for middle-Americana to bear on a script by Bill Lancaster, son of Burt. [24 Oct 2010, p.46]
Michael Ritchie keeps his dead-end cynicism in check and produces a genuinely funny comedy about a Little League team managed by a lovably drunken Walter Matthau. Sometimes Ritchie goes too far in avoiding the family-movie cliches the subject invites and indulges in some pointless vulgarity, but all in all, it's one of his best films.
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The Bad News Bears is, in a way, [Ritchie's] most harrowing portrait of how we'd sometimes rather win than keep our self-respect. He directs scenes for comedy even in the face of his disturbing material and that makes the movie all the more effective; sometimes we laugh, and sometimes we can't, and the movie's working best when we're silent.
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Has a number of other virtues that make it a surprisingly painless adventure. Among these are the screenplay by Bill Lancaster, Burt's son, who has the talent and discipline to tell the story of The Bad News Bears almost completely in terms of what happens on the baseball diamond or in the dugout.
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