Three strikes and you're out

Richard Linklater made the hugely enjoyable School Of Rock, but his remake of The Bad News Bears, a family baseball movie from 1976, is bad news for admirers of the original.

Billy Bob Thornton takes over the Walter Matthau role of a bad-tempered baseball coach who licks a young baseball team of no-hopers into shape, and he's OK at first as he reprises (in a slightly more childfriendly way) the title role he played so memorably in Bad Santa.

Unfortunately, the script also requires Thornton to mellow and find love, in the form of one of the children's mothers, Marcia Gay Harden. Billy Bob isn't very good at mellowing.

He is also let down by the child actors, who just aren't talented. The original co-starred Tatum O'Neal in her youthful prime, and she has no equivalent here.

The script, which largely recycles scenes from the original, assumes that sportsmanship is an old-fashioned concept, and that foul-mouthed children are funny, which they aren't (parents should be warned that there's a lot of very bad language).

The brats on display here are so irredeemably selfish and supercilious that I kept hoping they would lose.

Bad News Bears
Cert: cert12A