There were a lot of strikes against a Bad News Bears sequel from the start. First of all, The Bad News Bears was never designed to have a sequel. Most underdog sports stories are not, for the very simple reason that by the end of the movie, their stars are no longer the underdogs. To continue, even if you’re simply retelling the same story beats with some variation (the attitude of all but the most successful sequels), either the sports team will have to be reset back to underdogs, or the conflict will have to be intensified so their learning curve can continue.
Seeing as it was the ‘70s, the Bears baseball team lost at the end of their original – but not without “learning a life lesson” and coming very, veeeery close to victory. So the Rocky II course of action was open to ‘em, to play the wicked Yankees for real this next year, with winning the only option. Never mind that scheme totally undermines the point of The Bad News Bears! Or never mind that scheme entirely, for it’s not what happens. Instead what happens is…oh, it’s complicated, we’ll get to that.
But first, another challenge: the headlining stars of Part One are gone. Farewell Walter Matthau and Tatum O’Neil, with essentially zero fanfare and equally no explanation. That leaves (most of) the rest of the Bears, kids now taking on main character status in Coach Buttermaker’s absence. It’s like promoting Paul Walker to lead in 2 Fast 2 Furious, but for sequel-desperate producers it’ll have to do. At least they had Jackie Earle Haley as a child (rather than child molester), whose bad boy Kelly Leak automatically ascends to lead.
Most of the other remembered Bears are back in The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training – a title I still can’t quite parse out, despite whole nanoseconds of meditation upon it. At least the roster with personality remains, never mind that means it’s mostly benchwarmers now:
Tanner Boyle (Chris Barnes), the most essential returning ingredient, seeing as his loudmouthed vulgarity (noticeably reduced, per spineless parental critiques, ignoring that was the reason the first was so popular) is the Bears’ identity. He also proves to be the team’s heart.
Ahmad Abdul-Rahim (Erin Blunt), Hank Aaron enthusiast – though that fact is simply forgotten about in Breaking Training, rendering Ahmad simply “the token.”
Mexicans Jose and Miguel Agilar (Jaime Escobedo, George Gonzales), who get double the dialogue they got in the first. So they now say two words between ‘em.
Jimmy Feldman, notable only because actor Brett Marx is the grandson of Gummo Marx, the only Marx Brother who didn’t bother appearing in film (though Zeppo may as well have declined, for the difference it made).
Rudi Stein (David Pollock), the Jew.
Alfred Ogilvie (Alfred W. Lutter), the team’s statistician. This is closer than ever now to a superpower, as Ogilvie basically runs strategy. He could make a killing as a sports bookie when older.
Also returning is essential fat kid Mike Engleberg, though actor Jeffrey Louis Star is new. Among the returning Bears, this is the only recasting, because all fat kids are alike, right?
Let’s not forget team runt Lupus (Quinn Smith), even if his broken leg gives him a mere one scene in Breaking Training. Maybe it was Smith’s parents holding out, or something, but lemonade is made as Lupus’ plight becomes the driving force for the Bears this time. In an example of the kids parroting Knute Rockne All American, Tanner reuses that classic film’s rousing pre-game speech (“Win just one for the Gipper” – so excellently parodied in Airplane!). Now it’s “Win just one for the Looper.” This is the moment of highest intended-drama in Breaking Training, so it’s a shame all the power rides on one’s memory of a then-37-year-old movie.
But what of their game? ‘Cause there’s gotta be a big climactic game, to follow the newly-cemented sports comedy playbook. Well, it’s a “game in Houston.” That’s all we’re fed for quite a long time, as the Bears wend their way from Los Angeles to Houston, a destination the movie paints as heaven-on-earth, not some know-nothing freaking one-horse-town like Los Angeles. Sheesh!
Whatever this big game is, it mustn’t be all that hoity-toity, since the pre-teens are driving themselves across the desert, in a “Scooby” van Kelly stole from – let’s just ignore where, and also forget how Kelly was essentially a drug dealer in Part One. There’s not even a coach now, Matthau MIA, so it’s just the kids. Reality gets a bone thrown to it briefly as the kids con their parents into thinking the local groundskeeping moron is their coach, though this is quickly entering the Home Alone 2, 3 Ninjas Kick Back realm of kid fantasy.
Okay, so it’s a kids’ fantasy, where competence drains from a person as age increases. They still need a pitcher, in order to be a baseball team and all (ya think?). Kelly pulls one out of thin air, practically, with no references or anything: Carmen Rozonni (Jimmy Baio), a New York thug and castoff West Side Story extra. So…one new character. That’s some under-ambitious sequelizing, that is. And Carmen can’t even pitch! Whoopsie on that one, Kelly, but at least it reduces the team somewhat back to underdog status.
The Bears don’t even learn of Carmen’s crippling ineptitude until they randomly accept a game against a gang of New Mexico toughs, as they wend their way through various road movie montages. In fact, the whole team looks pretty incapable of the baseball basics here. Of course, there was a lot more to the ’76 Bears than just the players listed above. There were also the unnamed workhorses who could play. It’s just the benchwarmers now, as stated (also Kelly), which is a stupidly artificial way to up the stakes.
So again, what game are these ballpark dregs heading to, so many hundreds of miles away? Well, it’s in the Astrodome, we know that much. And it’s against the Toros, the Texas State Champs. (Bears vs. Bulls? Sounds like the stock market.) Later on it turns out this is all a charity exhibition game, with nothing at stake at all (other than a whole movie’s running time).
The Game falls apart even more when we examine it. Why did the coachless, pitcherless, bargain basement Bears get invited to this thing, when they were the second place team in their local San Fernando Little League? Dialogue continually refers to the Bears as “California’s beloved” or some other noncommittal thing. They’re treated like the state champs, which is how this’d make sense, except there’s no way that could’ve happened in under a year. That’s the kind of awkward situation this sequel puts us in, where the raised stakes do not mesh with the continuity of the first.
But behind every questionable Texas business venture, there’s always the same explanation:
Yeah, that guy. No different than in 1943’s Clancy Street Boys, and no different today. In Breaking Training, he’s called Sy Orlansky (Clifton James, player of – ugh! – Sheriff J.W. Pepper in Live and Let Die and The Man With the Golden Gun). Sy owns and operates Anheuser Busch, at least in the fictional sense where it’s located in Texas, not St. Louis. For Budweiser product placement, that’s a huge step up from Buttermaker’s liquor receptacle of choice. So a hopping-mad Texan billionaire made all this happen, which is maybe the simplest justification for the strangeness of this whole plot.
Anyway, the Bears make it to Texas and immediately run afoul of the police, seeing as they’re a dozen or so unaccompanied minors three states afield (that’s Western states, where that means something). The cops don’t care about that stolen van (“It’s out of my jurisdiction” – okay, sure, whatever), but the Bears need a coach. It’s the law! Luckily Kelly knows a convenient candidate/source-of-drama right here in Houston!
For that’s where his father Mike Leak lives (William Devane, a “that guy” I’ve seen in dozens of films but can never place). Boy, good thing some drunken plutocrat in, say, Montreal didn’t invite them to an expo! And after half a sports comedy wasted on road trip shenanigans, this is the filmmakers’ late-hour effort to insert in some honest drama into the mix. For this is the first time Kelley’s seen Mike in 8 years. It’s not wholly unlike the character scenes between Buttermaker and Amanda in Part One, more so even in presentation than in premise. Only it’s worse. That weakens this relationship, leaving it to the actors alone to do what they can with it.
The Bears insist they only need Mike as a token adult representative; they don’t need no coach! Their continued inability to play halfway functional baseball says otherwise, however. Mike resolves to coach them, for baseball is naturally something he’s great at, being a self-respecting all-American male with a blue collar job. That means a replay of the “Buttermaker turns the team around” scenes that formed so very much of The Bad News Bears, only on a reduced timeframe, and with a much less interesting adult figure (Mike is too faultless to be entertaining, son’s estrangement aside).
So with less than a day before they play the greatest Little League team in all of Texas, I tell you what, Mike teaches the Bears the following: How to field a ball. How to throw. How to bat. How to run the bases. You know, a bunch of things you’d think a team in this predicament would know. Carmen gets the best arc of all, as a simple catchphrase is all he needs to go from “never pitched” to “pitches at competition level” in an instant. There was a low key realism to The Bad News Bears, which Breaking Training is desperate to reclaim, without doing any of the work. The result is a meandering thing, with little momentum and little identity.
Okay, so the Toros appear to harass the Bears, since ya gotta make the rival team villainous at some point. These kids have no personalities, beyond “Texan.” That means they play baseball real good-like, and are very capable with the word “faggot.” Not that the movie stereotypes or anything. They corner Kelly, with lots of nasty things to say about Mike – leaving the whole gigantic “California” target completely alone. Rather than fight them (arc!), Kelly runs away all dramatic-like. That’s Rorschach, everyone!
The day of the big Game comes – the very next day. Lest we think all these crowds are amassing to watch some Californian ragamuffins, let it be known it’s only a four inning game, since the Houston Astros need the field to continue recovering from their horrendous 1975 season. Astros cameos aside (they mean nothing to me), how ‘bout that Astrodome? Oh sure, it’s hugely important in the history of sports stadium architecture, but it’s treated here with the sort of reverence usually reserved for the City of Oz.
With a mere four innings of play, this climactic game can actually proceed without editing. (Not many sports movies can boast likewise.) There’s some standard tension beforehand, as everyone worries where Kelly is. That allows him to make a dramatic entrance right on cue, just as Tanner is doing his “Looper” speech. Give ‘em a break with this cliché, though, it was a long time ago and they hadn’t perfected it yet.
That out of the way, the game can go like all such movie games must: The bad guys take an early lead, all seems lost, then the goodies make an unlikely 11th hour turnaround against all odds and win with pluck and wackiness. That’s mostly how it goes here, and the Toros are allowed to look like giant assholes (that is, look Texan).
There’s one notable moment: Half way through the game, an Astros official gathers the umps to declare the game over early on account of “You didn’t play it fast enough.” There’s a mostly subtle inference that the Toros and Astros are in on some gigantic baseball conspiracy, which is petty and stupid and cheap and therefore exceedingly realistic. The Bears are ushered off the field, to make way for the pros, leaving only little Tanner alone, refusing to budge. This is the most poetic image in Breaking Training.
Umpires chase Tanner around, as he throws a base at their groins. I feel bad that I laughed. And slowly, first one person, then many, the assembled crowds begin a chant: “Let them play!” On it goes, the volume growing and growing, as Breaking Training, against the odds, earns its own immortality in the sports genre. Hell, the moment’s even moved out to real life, such as at the 2002 All-Star Game – in response to the same bureaucratic foolishness. Then there’s movies like Beerfest and Dodgeball, which reference/parody the moment.
Of course, in the face of such a swelling, the game will continue. This marks the turnaround point for the Bears, as the Toros never once again score (just as the Bears hadn’t scored once yet). And it being a baseball movie of a most formulaic nature, the final play cannot be anything but a two outs, bases loaded, down by three, two strikes scenario. You know, the most exciting single moment in all of sports (barring perhaps a soccer shootout), and the lone reason baseball is interesting. Carmen gets to hit the winning home run, for some reason, and the Bears win this time. Which is more suspenseful than in most sequels, considering the Part One loss.
Director Michael Pressmen, formerly of The Great Texas Dynamite Chase (huh?) and later of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (another recent post!), is not much of a visionary, and brings a mostly flat and professional sheen to The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training. Of course Michael Ritchie isn’t the greatest of directors either, but his Bad News Bears at least had a way with actors and tone, even if the technical merits were somehow worse. In fact, Breaking Training depicts the least inspiring sort of sequel stagnation. It gains a larger budget, for new locations and better cameras, which ultimately makes it just resemble all other films of the period. Nearly everything that made the first work is scuttled or sabotaged, from the actors to the tone to the storyline (entirely too convoluted this time). None of the first’s nostalgic presentation of Little League remains, leaving only the most surface-level comedy. One could feel strongly about The Bad News Bears; one could hardly feel anything for this.
Related posts:
• No. 1 The Bad News Bears (1976)
• No. 3 The Bad News Bears Go to Japan (1978)
• No. 4 Bad News Bears (2005)
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