A grizzled little league coach (Thornton) tries to turn his team of misfits into champs. [TRAILER]

STEVEN SNYDER'S REVIEW

The fact that “Bad News Bears” is rated PG-13 is indicative of the movie’s identity crisis. There are literally two films awkwardly colliding here – one resembling the R-rated drunken night of a college student’s rowdiness, the other resembling the awkward, PG-rated apology from a hung over man who knows he went too far.

These opposing forces ultimately cancel each other out, leaving a void where there should be a center. Here’s a film for multiple audiences, but also for no one, changing tone and demeanor from scene to scene and, in some instances, from line to line.

Billy Bob Thornton stars as Buttermaker, though it seems more as if he’s reprising his role in “Bad Santa.” Here, just like in that comedy, he is a drunken, apathetic, foul-mouthed loser who occasionally sobers up just enough to remember that he once had potential. A minor league ball player who played almost a whole inning in the big leagues, he is a bitter and angry man who yearns for nothing more than the next paycheck to fund his daily trip to the liquor store.

That paycheck now comes in the form of a little league coaching gig. Clearly a 21 st-century twist in the story (I am not familiar with the original film), a mother has sued a competitive league for not letting her child play, and her little boy has joined eight others as the team of misfits who can only take the field thanks to a judicial injunction.

But Buttermaker, to put it mildly, doesn’t care and barely notices their inadequacies. He works as a rodent exterminator during the day, and then comes to practice drunk at night. Midway through batting practice, he blacks out on the mound, and he forfeits the team’s first game during the first inning out of mercy for his talent-less bunch of uncoordinated, ill-mannered and disabled players – yes, one of the kids is in a wheel chair.

But the bitterness, anger and self-hatred that made “Bad Santa” such a brazenly offensive, and unapologetically hilarious confection, doesn’t quite meld with the naïve nostalgia of a children’s film. “Bad News Bears,” as envisioned by director Richard Linklater (“Before Sunset,” “Waking Life”) is a fundamentally flawed premise. “Bad Santa” took the wholesome nature of Christmas, but then detached Thornton from both the pageantry and the kids, who were horrified by his drunken demeanor. He was the demented guy who crashed the party, the outsider who didn’t really cause any harm but was acting irresponsibly. Here, though, “Bad News Bears” asks us to laugh at a guy who is literally berating and ignoring the kids who look up to him as a role model. The children’s film nature of things keeps reminding us that he is not a harmless hack, but just a jerk, through and through.

Not that the kids are all that much better. They scuffle, swear and beat each other up, but their rudeness is on a level completely different than Buttermaker’s. For them, using the middle finger is extreme. For Buttermaker, he goes from coaching a baseball practice to hanging out with strippers – perhaps from the strip club he gets to sponsor his team – and taking his players out to Hooters.

The film has laughs, but they exist outside the main story. They are funny asides as Thornton seemingly rehearses for “Bad Santa 2,” but they are never organic to this tale of a team that goes from worst to best, and of a drunken coach who goes from being an apathetic observer to an excited, involved motivator.

One gets the feeling this film would be more fun to read as a script, with all the various one-liners and pratfalls that paint the picture of snotty people acting like the snots they really are.

But in its current form, these lines and this humor gets missed. For the younger audiences looking for a cheerful baseball movie, they’ll likely be caught off guard by the quick four-letter words and the genuine rotten nature of Buttermaker. For the older audiences, looking for some dirty jokes, the movie is too timid for that – and it has to be. When you’re dealing with kids in a movie about team sports, you can only go so far before either the kids seem deranged or the coach seems abusive.

There’s two movies here that can’t be reconciled; a halfway affair that suffers from feeling somehow both watered-down and overdone. Imagine “Bad Santa” mixed with “The Sandlot,” and you have “Bad News Bears.”

Having trouble doing that? Imagine the troubles Linklater must have had in making it.

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