The Bad News Bears Go to Japan

What is going on here?! Where are The Bears? This is a Tony Curtis film. And his character wears out after 5 minutes. There are lengthy stretches of the film where The Bears barely appear, if at all! Like the 15 minute karate exhibition, or the 10 minute Game Show nonsense. And how bout some subtitles for the long conversations in Japanese. Viewers outside of Japan don't need the realism of communication breakdown. The heart and cleverness of the original are completely missing here, and we're left with Tony Curtis (a great actor) rambling on like a cheap salesman. The newly added Mustapha (Scoody Thornton) gives us a few cute moments, but Kelly (Jackie Earle Haley), the leader of the team, is little to be seen. And where's Tanner!! Don't poke this bear.

It had to happen. After the success of "The Bad News Bears" and "Breaking Training" the film execs at Paramount knew they had a goldmine on their hands and couldn't leave well enough alone. They started on the right track by enlisting Bill Lancaster to write the script. He also authored the original. Sadly that is where the similarities end.

"The Bad News Bears Go To Japan" is one of the worst films of the 70's. It's so bad the many of the kids from the first two don't even appear in this one. The ones that do are given little to do save for team leader Kelly Leak who gets to romance a young japanese girl. The love story is laughably bad.

The coach this time around is Tony Curtis playing a con man looking for his next score. Curtis looks as if he is in a trance as he sleepwalks thru the film.

And the worst part? There is very little baseball in a movie about little leaguers!!! We get more scenes of sumo wrestling. The one baseball game we DO get is badly directed and comes so late in the film you may have either fallen asleep or turned it off.

And why send the kids all the way to Japan? A bit far fetched don't you think? Apparently the first film was a smash hit in Japan, playing in one theater for over a year. That says it all. The filmmakers knew that no matter how badly it bombed here (and it did) that they would have a hit in Japan (and it was). Too bad they didn't care that the product they were presenting was no better than a student film on a tiny budget. No. Take that back. A student film on a tiny budget would have to be ten times better than this pathetic "comedy."

This film didn't follow-up to the first two successful sequels! John Berry, was not a good director, and especially a bad script!!!

Tony Curtis (Father of Jamie Lee, starred in "Halloween" the same year), did an Ok job, and I say that this film was disaster!!!

NO STARS!!!

Tony Curtis in his memoirs said he was not pleased with the results of The Bad News Bears Go To Japan. Probably he thought when signing on for this film in the first place he was going to be part of a hit series like James Bond. Unfortunately this film came up way short and The Bad New Bears ground to a halt.

Try as I might I could not wrap my mind around the concept that the parents of this club would send their kids unchaperoned to Japan with an unregenerate conman like Tony Curtis. Not like Curtis hasn't played hustlers on the big screen, he has and quite successfully. But that character he has done is jarringly out of place in a family type film.

Curtis is a down and out promoter who has the idea to promote the Bad News Bears to play the champion team of Japan. That's roughly like getting the Harlem Globetrotters to play the NBA champions, the Bears play in a style like the Globetrotters.

When it proves successful all kinds of people want to cash in and Curtis has to reexamine his own life.

Couldn't buy it and I doubt audiences in 1978 were buying it.

Well, I explained before my love of the first Bad News Bears and how I wanted to see the sequels thinking maybe they were not given a fair chance. But I was so sad to see that there was no Buttermaker in either films since technically he made the story what it was and the second one took on more to the team's story, which wasn't so bad, but it wasn't needed. The Bears now are more annoying and it wasn't appreciated what the writers did to the story or the characters, because the story became desperate.

The Bears apparently didn't win any trip to Japan despite that's what they said in the second sequel that they'd win a trip to Japan if they won the game like they did in the astrodome, but Japan is upset with the fact that no teams have come to America or they decline because Japan has beaten the American teams 9 to 11 games. The Bears get a sponsor who takes them to Japan anyways to help them win a game against the Japenese team, but apparently that's nothing written in the script about the Bears being talented in Baseball.

The third installment of The Bad News Bears is pretty bad and I was disappointed with how the sequels were made, I mean, were they absolutely necessary? I don't think so, I think honestly the die hard fans of the first Bad News Bears would agree that this was insulting to the original story, and I'm sorry that I rented the sequels, maybe I could say it was an accident and I was out of it when I picked them out.

2/10