Morris Buttermaker is a washed-up alcoholic baseball player who was a pitcher for the Seattle Mariners before getting kicked out of professional baseball for attacking an umpire. He works as an exterminator and is a crude womanizer. He is hired by Liz Whitewood to coach the Bears, a children's baseball team with poor playing skills. They play their first game and do not even make an out before he forfeits the game. The entire team decides to quit after but Buttermaker forces them out of quitting and promises to be a better coach. Amanda Whurlitzer, a skilled pitcher, is the 12-year-old daughter of one of his ex-girlfriends. After a couple requests, she decides to join the team. Kelly Leak, a local troublemaker but solid hitter, also joins the team, and the Bears start winning games. Before the championship game Liz congratulates Buttermaker on his success and then they have sex. The Bears eventually make it to the championship game. In the middle of that game, the Bears and Yankees fight after Amanda is shoved during a play at the plate. A few innings later the Yankees coach Roy Bullock orders his son Joey to intentionally walk Mike Engleberg, one of the Bears' best hitters. Instead of walking him, he almost hits Engleberg, causing Roy to push Joey to the ground in anger. As revenge, Joey throws Engleberg an easy pitch which he smacks for a home run and leaves the game with his mother. Later, Buttermaker changes the lineup, putting the benchwarmers in and taking out some of the good players which causes the Bears to fall behind heading into the last half of the inning. With two outs, one of the Bears players, Garo, drives in two runs and tries to score to tie the game but is thrown out at the plate on a close call, causing the Bears to lose the championship 8–7. After the game, Buttermaker gives them non-alcoholic beer, and they spray it all over each other. Although they did not win the championship, they have the satisfaction of trying, knowing that winning is not so important.
Bad News Bears received mixed reviews from critics. Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an approval rating of 48% based on 161 reviews, with an average rating of 5.64/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "This too-faithful remake aims low for laughs, turning off the easily offendable; despite another lovably irascible contribution by Thornton, it lacks the ensemble strength and originality of the 1976 version." Metacritic gives the film a score of 65 out of 100, based on 35 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". On CinemaScore, audiences gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three stars out of four, praising Thornton's performance in particular, saying: "The movie is like a merger of ugly drunk in Bad Santa and his football coach in Friday Night Lights, yet doesn't recycle from either movie; he modulates the manic anger of the Santa and the intensity of the coach and produces a morose loser who we like better than he likes himself." James Berardinelli of ReelViews also gave Bad News Bears three stars out of four, calling it "an entertaining motion picture" that "won't make fans forget the original, but it's not so feeble that it disappears into the earlier movie's shadow." Giving the film two stars out of five, Don R. Lewis of Film Threat said that it has "a few laughs" but that it "just trudges on, going through the motions of the original with no spark" and that it "suffer from the unbearable, crushing weight of political correctness." Paula Nechak of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer called the film "simply another in a long line of utterly unnecessary remakes that, having nothing new to say, clutch at crassness and dumbness," while Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle said that while "the screenplay makes the most of Thornton's dry, skewed humor, nothing happens here that would distinguish this film from other sports movies."
Legacy
In a case of life imitating art, in 2012, a Los Angeles-area little league in financial difficulty received a donation from the owner of a local strip club in order to continue operating. Comparisons were immediately made to a scene in Bad News Bears in which the team received a donation from "Bo-Peeps Gentlemen's Club" and is required to put the logo of the strip club on their uniforms. The real-life club did not require similar stipulations, preferring to donate anonymously. However, local civic leaders encouraged that the club in question be made public so that they could get the proper recognition they deserved. Jeffrey Davies the young actor who portrayed the main character Kelly Leak was involved in a hit and run motorcycle accident in May 2019. He suffered multiple injuries including a traumatic brain injury. He is currently wheelchair bound and is working to regain mobility and speech function.
