The Bad News Bears Go to Japan (1978)
In this third film version of the Bad News Bears series, Tony Curtis plays a small time promotor/hustler who takes the pint-sized baseball team to Japan for a match against the country's best little league baseball team which sparks off a series of adventures and mishaps the boys come into.
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If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.
One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.
One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.
Blistering performances.
Tony Curtis in his memoirs said he was not pleased with the results of The Bad News Bears Go To Japan. Probably he thought when signing on for this film in the first place he was going to be part of a hit series like James Bond. Unfortunately this film came up way short and The Bad New Bears ground to a halt. Try as I might I could not wrap my mind around the concept that the parents of this club would send their kids unchaperoned to Japan with an unregenerate conman like Tony Curtis. Not like Curtis hasn't played hustlers on the big screen, he has and quite successfully. But that character he has done is jarringly out of place in a family type film.Curtis is a down and out promoter who has the idea to promote the Bad News Bears to play the champion team of Japan. That's roughly like getting the Harlem Globetrotters to play the NBA champions, the Bears play in a style like the Globetrotters.When it proves successful all kinds of people want to cash in and Curtis has to reexamine his own life. Couldn't buy it and I doubt audiences in 1978 were buying it.
THE BAD NEWS BEARS GO TO JAPAN was decent because you still have a majority of the cast still there. They still have foul mouths and can play the game, but Tanner was sorely missed and a few of the other boys. Ogilvie is really missed as well. The brain has to be in the movie. He's the baseball whiz. Amanda would've been good in 2 and 3 but Tatum wouldn't have done them. And the late great Walter Matthau would've been good in all of them too. That would've made the story much better. Originality. Same cast would've made this film really, really good. But I can say this, Kelly Leak and Ahmad Abdul Rahim were the only ones really representing in this one. Being the only tough guys left from the last two. Ahmad's little brother Mustapha made a cool introduction as the little guy. And Kelly and the girl subplot was kind of weird. All in all, more baseball and less wrestling would've been better. But you gotta love the Bears.
The franchise is getting very old and tiring here and the once funny antics of those rambunctious little leaguers on the Bears baseball team aren't even the least bit funny anymore. Many of the kids from the first two films chose not to appear in this one (that may be one of the problems) and Tony Curtis seems lost in his role as the team's new coach, a shifty con man who attempts to make some big money by sending the Bears off to Japan for a highly publicized exhibition game against Japan's best little league baseball team. Paramount wisely chose to end the series after this one.
This film didn't follow-up to the first two successful sequels! John Berry, was not a good director, and especially a bad script!!!Tony Curtis (Father of Jamie Lee, starred in "Halloween" the same year), did an Ok job, and I say that this film was disaster!!!NO STARS!!!