Reception
Critical reaction to Bad News Bears was mixed. The film holds a rating of 45% on Rotten Tomatoes and a score of 65 out of 100 on Metacritic.
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."
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