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Mr. Woodcock

Directed by Craig Gillespie

Written by Michael Carnes and Josh Gilbert

Starring Billy Bob Thornton, Seann William Scott,Susan Sarandon and Amy Poehler

Classification: 14A

Rating: *1/2

After Bad Santa and Bad News Bears, Mr. Woodcock is the third comedy in five years where Billy Bob Thornton throws on a porcupine toupee and grumbles and snaps at kids for 90-some minutes.

Thornton plays an evil grade-school gym teacher in his new film. Not that Mr. Woodcock is new exactly. The movie was filmed in 2005, but test-screened badly — too few realized it was a comedy, apparently. Director David Dobkin ( Wedding Crashers) signed on for an expensive rescue mission, shooting three weeks of additional scenes last winter.

He should have shot the film's writers and started over, making a movie about fourth lead Amy Poehler ( Saturday Night Live). Everyone else in Mr. Woodcock is trapped in hopelessly one-dimensional characters. Thornton's gym teacher is a pull-string villain repeating recycled taunts: "You are a disgrace to fat, gelatinous, out-of-shape kids everywhere!" is a constant refrain.

Poehler, though, captures the filmmakers' real interest, perhaps because, living in Hollywood, the screenwriters and directors know someone like Poehler's Maggie Hoffman: a brawling, liquor-fuelled publicist who lives for bagging A-journalist pelts. When she lands Oprah for bestselling author John Farley (Seann William Scott), a self-help guru, Maggie is gay as a thrush.

Then John bails from Oprah upon discovering his mom (Susan Sarandon) is about to marry the vile Mr. Woodcock. Maggie takes the defection very badly, gargling vodka while flying next to an empty seat to Chicago. A flight attendant approaches, bearing a cart of tiny airline liquors.

"Can I get a real bottle?" Maggie hisses, baring her teeth. "I'm an alcoholic, not a Barbie doll."

With that, the first and only big laugh of the film, Mr. Woodcock cuts to John and mom and Woodcock in Small Town, Nebraska. Only problem is we don't want to follow. We want to continue having fun knocking back airline mickies with Maggie. Who cares about John and his mom? The filmmakers obviously don't. Otherwise, why would they cast Scott, four years removed from playing a high-school stoner in Dude, Where's My Car? as a lifestyle oracle?

Mr. Woodcock might better be called Dude, Where's My Mom? Scott's character, author of the bestseller Letting Go: How to Get Past the Past, spends the movie trying to recover his always-smiling mother from the clutches of his childhood, gym-teacher nemesis (Flashbacks establish that John was all of fat, gelatinous and out-of-shape as a child). John and Woodcock yell at and wrestle each other. Later, they compete in a furious corn-eating contest at a state fair. Thornton never cracks a smile (although he did break an ankle during a fight scene, apparently). His gloom is infectious. Ordinarily a bounding puppy, Scott is a cranky-pants throughout. Mr. Woodcock's audience won't be any happier. Who wants to watch any film where Sarandon, the sexiest 60-year-old woman alive, is first prize in a corn-eating contest?

Special to The Globe and Mail