Metacritic reviews

The Bad News Bears is about kids, but they're real kids, not bland, cutesy, lovable Hollywood moppets. These pre-teens are unwashed, obnoxious, cynical, fractious, gleefully profane, unrepentantly juvenile, and deeply untrusting of any sort of authority — in other words, just like the kids you probably played team sports with.

The Bad News Bears is an extremely funny adult-child comedy film. Walter Matthau stars to perfection as a bumbling baseball coach in the sharp production about the foibles and follies of little-league athletics.

Surprisingly, improbably, The Bad News Bears is the year's funniest movie. It is very much like the team itself: no serious threat at first, but, finally, tough to beat.

The movie is both an antidote to the sentimentality that currently affects sports movies and the last hurrah for the glorious disreputability that characterized the genre in the late '60s and early '70s.

Michael Ritchie keeps his dead-end cynicism in check and produces a genuinely funny comedy about a Little League team managed by a lovably drunken Walter Matthau. Sometimes Ritchie goes too far in avoiding the family-movie cliches the subject invites and indulges in some pointless vulgarity, but all in all, it's one of his best films.

Amiably engrossing satire on the 'win ethic' that offers a take-it-or-leave-it approach to its serious points about enforcing precociousness on kids, but consistently delights with its panoramic comic invention.

Matthau should get points for allowing himself to be filmed as such an unlikable cuss, and Vic Morrow, as usual, is just short of psychotic.

The Bad News Bears is, in a way, [Ritchie's] most harrowing portrait of how we'd sometimes rather win than keep our self-respect. He directs scenes for comedy even in the face of his disturbing material and that makes the movie all the more effective; sometimes we laugh, and sometimes we can't, and the movie's working best when we're silent.

Although the film could have been preachy, Ritchie handles the story and theme with deftness.

Has a number of other virtues that make it a surprisingly painless adventure. Among these are the screenplay by Bill Lancaster, Burt's son, who has the talent and discipline to tell the story of The Bad News Bears almost completely in terms of what happens on the baseball diamond or in the dugout.