Bad Words
January 26, 2026
BLU-RAY DISC REVIEW:
Universal;
Comedy;
$19.98 Blu-ray;
Rated ‘R’ for crude and sexual content, language and brief nudity.
Stars Jason Bateman, Kathryn Hahn, Rohan Chand, Philip Baker Hall, Ben Falcone, Allison Janney.
Blending the zany premise of Billy Madison with the dark wit of Bad Santa, Bad Words is a subversively funny send-up of the national spelling bee.
The 2014 film marks the directorial debut of Jason Bateman, who also stars as Guy Trilby, a 40-year-old who decides to compete in the spelling bee after discovering a loophole that lets him enter despite being three decades older than the other competitors. What sets Bad Words apart is the way it plays the material completely straight. Guy isn’t some kid trapped in a man’s body. He’s pretty much just a huge jerk, willing to cheat and intimidate the other kids in order to win. This naturally upsets the parents of the students he keeps beating, which is the source of some of the film’s best gags.
The overriding question, of course, is why Guy is so intent on winning the spelling bee, the answer to which frames the second half of the film.
Bateman was a natural choice to play Guy, a role that allowed him to push back a bit against the typical clean family type characters for which he had been best known to that point (this was three years before he starred in “Ozark”). He also shares a winning chemistry with plucky child actor Rohan Chand, who plays a contestant who befriends Guy.
Bateman discusses his first outing as a director in a solo commentary track, in which he really lets viewers inside his head as he reveals how he re-worked the script, which parts of the movie he thinks work better than others, and which parts he would have shot differently in hindsight.
The Blu-ray also includes a short behind-the-scenes featurette and a batch of deleted scenes that are mostly just jokes snipped from scenes that ended up in the movie.
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