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Every Richard Linklater Movie, Ranked
With a sensibility defined by boundless curiosity and wanderlust, Linklater has refused to be boxed in.
Linklater doesn’t add anything to his Bad News Bears that wasn’t present in the original film, so the best he can do is mimic it skillfully, giving Billy Bob Thornton a role as thoroughly in his wheelhouse as Jack Black in School of Rock and hitting all the ornery, underdog-sports-movie beats. Turning Eric Schlosser’s muckraking (and stomach-turning) polemic about the fast-food industry into a fiction feature didn’t sound like a promising idea, for reasons Linklater’s adaptation often articulates all too well: The facts and figures that compose a strong argument can’t be translated smoothly into dialogue. Casting Matthew McConaughey, Ethan Hawke, Skeet Ulrich, and Vincent D’Onofrio in the lead roles, Linklater follows the brothers’ audacious nighttime raids, which involve blowing safes with nitroglycerin, but he’s just as content to bask in period bric-a-brac and enjoy their tomcatting and roughhousing off the clock.
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