This new version of Bad News Bears is so faithful to the original as to be entirely unnecessary. So little has changed that the screenwriter of the 1976 version shares the writing credit for the new version, and he's been dead for 8 years. The baseball scenes even use the same music, excerpts from Bizet's Carmen.
In place of Walter Matthau, we get Billy Bob Thornton this time, doing a toned-down and laid-back variation on his Bad Santa character. I wasn't a fan of Bad Santa, but a large part of the character's appeal was his foul-mouthed willingness to say anything, no matter how inappropriate. If you tone that shtick down enough to fit into a PG-13 movie, you've robbed the character of his reason to exist, and Thornton struggles here to bring any energy to Morris Buttermaker.
As for the rest of the cast, Greg Kinnear plays the evil opposing coach, and he does that sort of smarmy yuppie as well as anyone, but it's not a very interesting part. Sammi Kane Kraft takes on the role of Amanda, the Bears' star pitcher, and you can tell she's trying hard, but she's no Tatum O'Neal.
Part of the problem with the movie is that times have changed. Hearing the kids use foul language in the original was genuinely shocking and unexpected; today, you can hear worse language than this on Saturday morning TV. (It's interesting that one of the few lines that didn't survive to the new version was one kid's description of the team as "a buncha Jews, spics, niggers, pansies, and a booger-eatin' moron;" those words apparently having become even more offensive in the last 30 years.)
The new Bad News Bears isn't an awful movie, really, and it'll probably entertain the kids or anyone else who never saw the original. But it's a movie with no purpose, with actors doing pale imitations of the original cast, so why bother? Just rent the original instead.
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