Bad Words will see limited release on March 14 before releasing wide on March 28.
Bad Words is the directorial debut from Jason Bateman, who for the last few years has found a niche in portraying responsible, affable, everyman characters like Arrested Development’s Michael Bluth. This is not one of those instances, and here we get to see him playing very much against type as an immature, foul-mouthed, ill-tempered narcissist.
Guy Trilby is a 40-year old professional proofreader, and a genius with a photographic memory. He’s also an exceedingly vulgar, comically cruel man-child with little regard for anyone else. Finding a loophole in the language of the esteemed Golden Quill Spelling Bee, he participates in — and wins — a series of spelling contests intended for elementary and middle school children. Despite his genius, Guy has no formal educational credentials. With an absentee father and unreliable mother, his childhood was such a tumultuous mess that he never passed eighth grade, a technicality that now makes him eligible for competition according to the rules as written.
Such is the ridiculous premise of Bad Words. If you can get behind the silly concept, it’s rife with potential for bawdy humor, and doesn’t waste a chance. This is a very funny movie. Irresponsible and distasteful, yes, but funny nevertheless. From the plot summary, one might expect a cheery, over-the-top Jim Carrey/Tom Shadyac sort of treatment, but Bateman’s take on the material is a darker shade of comedy. Guy Trilby’s antics aren’t wacky so much as overtly offensive and calculating, and he definitely delivers on the title’s promise of bad words. He says plenty of them, and not just in casual usage (though there’s a lot of that too). With his encyclopedic vocabulary, Trilby can craft and deliver insidiously clever, mellifluously obscene insults like William Shakespeare can write love sonnets — though at times he’s also content with just flipping the bird.
Guy makes it to the nationally televised Golden Quill championship, and as a competitor, he gets plenty of interaction with children — all of which is riddled with the same profanity, trickery, and contempt that he shows everyone else. It’s hard to explain the humor of this, but watching a grown man casually insult and berate young children is just so wrong that it becomes hilarious to behold. As Guy advances through the competition, he increasingly draws the scathing ire of parents and the Golden Quill organizers, which, of course, he addresses with more insults and haughtiness.
His biggest hurdle comes in the form Chaitanya Chopra, a cute, polite little Indian boy whom Guy mockingly renames “Slumdog”. Little Slumdog is not only one of the best spellers in the competition, but a lonely, bullied outsider who reminds Guy of his own difficult childhood. Slumdog immediately latches onto Guy and aggressively tries to be his friend. After several encounters, the little tyke starts to grow on him and a friendship is forged, leading to the film’s best sequence: a riotous montage of the pair going on a wildly inappropriate night out filled with alcohol-fueled partying, parking lot donuts, and vicious pranks.
Guy is accompanied in his insane quest by Jenny (Kathryn Hahn), a curious reporter with whom he develops a spiteful love-hate relationship (which involves some funny but painfully terrible bedroom antics). Jenny, like the audience, is trying to figure out what makes him tick. His motives for the absurd antics are unclear, leaving the audience to wonder throughout whether his awful behavior might actually serve some ultimate purpose. Eventually his motives are revealed (don’t worry — no spoilers here), but are probably the weakest aspect of the film as they seem both underplayed and totally inadequate to justify his extreme behavior — especially if you’ve invested in the film’s tagline, “The end justifies the mean”.
I’m sure that Bad Words will find an audience, though I couldn’t say exactly who its target viewer is. While adults will be critical to its theatrical box office numbers, I think its legacy will skew younger. This feels like an old-fashioned adult-rated comedy that’s ultimately — maybe even sneakily — made for kids. Like Kindergarten Cop or Police Academy, though more depraved. It’s a naughty offering of childhood fantasy that’s encapsulated in parallel by the sequence in which Guy takes Slumdog out to paint the town red. The spelling bee backdrop and cast are clearly appealing to children. The overall attitude of the film is totally juvenile, and the exceedingly profane humor is precisely in line with the kind of playground trash talk that kids love to revel in. This seems to me the kind of movie a 10-year old might desperately want to sneak into, catch at a sleepover, or watch with Dad under promise of “Don’t tell your Mom I let you see this” — and it might appeal to the kid in you, too. If a fun premise and plenty of laughs are more the measure of entertainment than a cohesive story, you could do a lot worse than to give Bad Words a shot.