Premise: A grown man uses a loophole to compete in the national spelling bee.
The pitch for this movie couldn’t be better made for me. I find it endlessly amusing to see adults bully kids in comedic ways. Kids swearing at adults. Adults swearing at kids. Adults acting childishly around kids. I love it all. I even had a good run of really loving the Scripps Spelling Bee for years. It fell off after I accidentally missed it a couple times, but I was a huge fan. I remember even joining a Facebook fan group for one of the kids*. The movie never came to local theaters or a streaming site, so I spent a lot of years not getting to it. Finally, I got my chance on HBO Max.
*Fun fact: The kid actually found the Facebook group at one point. I forget exactly what he said, but it was something like “This is weird. You all are weird. This makes me uncomfortable.” So that was a real moment of realizing the bit had gone too far.
I was underwhelmed by the movie. Technically, all the stuff I wanted was there. Jason Bateman is very lewd and foul-mouthed. I love seeing him trash talk the kids and everyone else. Rohan Chand does a nice job as the corrupted youth. And when is Kathryn Hahn ever bad? Bateman stays childish to the bitter end. Where the movie lost me is in his reason for being in the Bee. It turns out that he’s the long-lost son of the director of the Bee who is trying to ruin its reputation as a way to get back at him for not being around. That alone is not enough for me. The movie either needs to interrogate Bateman’s reasoning for doing the Bee more or ignore it entirely. You know, I’m fine with pulling a Bad Santa where Billy Bob Thornton revels in being an asshole and we don’t care what made him that way. But Bad Words wants us to ask why Bateman would be in the Spelling Bee. That’s Hahn’s expressed purpose in the film. That means Bateman needs to have a human reason. It wants to examine the kind of person who would do this in the real world. How fucked up must the rest of his life be? I mean, they barely even touch on him not completing the 8th grade. In the film, Bateman avoids most of those questions by telling Hahn he doesn’t want to talk about it. That wasn’t good enough for me. The film set the ground rules then didn’t play by them. I was happy to watch a pure comedy. They chose to make it a dramedy, and as a dramedy, I found it lacking.
Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend
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