Adding to the “bad” movie pantheon – ‘Bad Santa,’ ‘Bad Teacher,’ ‘Bad Grandpa,’ ‘Horrible Bosses’ – comes a movie so generic that it’s just called ‘Behaving Badly,’ the CEREAL-brand cereal of “bad” movies. Based on the 2000 Ric Browde novel ‘When I’m Dead Feed The Dog’ (*emoji shrugging guy*), ‘Behaving Badly’ stars your usual inoffensive white “dork” who’s trying to win over the stereotypical hot chick, this time played by Selena Gomez, by doing lots of wiiild and craaazy stuff, like turning her house into a strip club. Remember when they already made this movie with Hayden Pannettiere?
Anyway, Rollergirl Heather Graham, Elizabeth Shue, and Mary Louise Parker all show up in hot outfits, as well as Gary Busey playing a cop who says surely ad-libbed things like “I will put you in prison with an inmate who will eat your head while you’re sleeping.” Which is ALMOST enough to recommend it. But really I just want to know when “wearing lots of different layers of shirts” became Hollywood visual shorthand for “nerdy outcast.”
Meanwhile, all the actors are such interchangeable scrubbed-clean Disney Channel mannequins that the only way you can tell the outcast from the cool guy is that the outcast has 12 layers of shirts and the cool guy always just wears a v-neck tee. Someday I’m going to publish a bird watcher-style guide to shitty high school movies.