Bad Words (2014) * 1/2

Directed by:  Jason Bateman

Starring:  Jason Bateman, Kathryn Hahn, Philip Baker Hall, Alison Janney, Rohan Chand, Ben Falcone

Jason Bateman plays Guy Trilby in Bad Words, which is also his directorial debut.     He is a 40ish man who enters a prestigious spelling bee (aimed at grade school participants) through bylaw technicalities in hopes of winning the top prize.     His reasons are made clear later, but he acts like such a jerk through most of the film that we can not make the transition when he starts playing nice.     It is a 180 degree character swerve that leaves us with whiplash.      The movie's tagline is "The end justifies the mean".    No, it doesn't.

Bateman spends a majority of the movie being mean to a reporter who is chronicling his story (Hahn), the stuffy overseers of the contest, and a 10-year old Indian fellow contestant that Guy insults and blows off at every opportunity...until the boy becomes useful to him.     Guy repays the boy by hiring a prostitute to flash her bare boobs at him for 10 seconds.     Very creepy.    Bad Words tries to shock for the sake of shocking, but it's unnecessary.     The tone could have quieter and less vicious.   

Turns out Guy has a sob story of his own.     He never met his father and his mother died recently, not before telling him that he was the product of an affair.     Because we've seen movies before, we know the father will turn up in the story at some point.    We also know the father's identity by applying Roger Ebert's Law of Economy of Characters, which means a seemingly insignificant character must ultimately be Guy's father.     We figure it out rather quickly.    I also realize I have been using Roger Ebert's Movie Glossary a lot these days.     It never goes out of fashion.

I suppose the idea of a 40-year old man whooping (figuratively) the other prepubescent contestants in a spelling bee is expected to be fascinatingly lowbrow.    We are expected to be aghast at such a prospect and begrudgingly admire the filmmakers for pushing boundaries.    The parents of the other kids are outraged.     They demand Guy be disqualified even though the rules do not prohibit him from competing.     It would have been funnier to see Guy maintain his cool while the parents behave like creeps, instead of acting like a creep himself.     The movie thinks that the only way to combat jerks is to be a bigger jerk yourself.

The payoff to Bad Words is unsatisfying as well.    It decides to go syrupy in the last 10 minutes, expecting us to forget the crap we had to endure up to this point.     We are expected to feel all warm inside because Guy may not be such a bad dude at long last.     I was reminded of Bad Santa, although even Bad Santa didn't switch gears in the final minutes and try to become a feel-good comedy.     Bad Words is a movie that pushes the envelope, tears it, and attempts to tape it back up again.