Publication Date: 04-05-2026

Bad Words (2013) review

Dir. Jason Bateman

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★★

Jason Bateman is one of those actors who can play a character that will go from collective and natural to mean and nasty as quickly as a sports car going zero to sixty. In Bad Words, his directorial debut, he’s a filthy and dreadfully unlikable man by the name of Guy Trilby, who has exploited a loophole in a national spelling bee, a competition meant for young, school-age children, that allows him to be a contender as well. Guy has never graduated middle school, leaving him to technically be in the same place as his younger competition, which means he has just as much of a right to compete as anyone.

Guy causes massive controversy at the spelling bees, mostly from outraged parents who have spent hard-earned dollars on spelling coaches, training books, and spelling lists to assure their child takes home the gold. Guy is now going for the win at one of the biggest spelling bees in the world, accompanied by a female reporter named Jenny Widgeon (Kathryn Hahn), who is desperately trying to get the core reason on why he chooses to involve himself in these competitions. In addition, in the hotel he is staying at for the competition he meets a cute little ten-year-old Indian boy named Chaitanya Chopra (Rohan Chand), who initially causes him an immense amount of grief with his insufferably niceness and his petulant requests for his favorite word. However, Chaitanya’s innocence eventually penetrates the great forcefield of meanness that Guy has constructed around himself and the two begin to form a strange bond throughout the entire competition.

It can’t be emphasized enough that Guy is one of the most disgusting leading characters for a film in quite sometime. His actions have a lot in common with that of Willie Soke in Bad Santa. This is a guy who is incredibly mean to everyone, says offensive things like they’re simple compliments, gets inside the heads of his young competitors just before they’re about to take the stage in probably the biggest moment of their young life, and who finds himself liked by virtually no one. Yet, Guy is a mesmerizing disgrace for a character in the regard that we can see just by the way he looks and acts behind closed doors that there’s a deeper reason behind this action that few would be willing to listen to. Most people just want him out of the bee or even dead; neither one seems to faze him much.

Bateman wouldn’t be the first person you’d think for Guy’s role, nor the first person you’d assume could direct such a fiasco either. Bateman is often low-key in his comedies, given a track record of films like Mike Judge’s Extract and Arrested Development, so to see him here emphasizing a cruder, more abrasive personality is something of a treat. I was one of the people to criticize Bateman’s project The Change-Up for being too filthy and not too funny and remorseless in its dirtiness, but I have not lost hope that black comedies centered on despicable protagonists couldn’t be made and couldn’t be made successfully. Because writer Andrew Dodge incorporates numerous one-liners into Bad Words‘ screenplay and makes his conversations with the children and their parents so shamelessly vulgar, along with the fact that Bateman seems to have some sort of bizarre affection for this character, Bad Words succeeds where one would suspect it would just get its dirty mind warped even more. Dodge even refrains from explicit resolutions or cutely-tied together conclusions in order to keep a bit of fog in the story so that it isn’t overly-obvious, in a move I wholeheartedly commend.

Finally, something must be said about the effortless likability of young actor Rohan Chand, whose bulging eyes and adorable smile have the ability to win one over in an instant. At a very tender age of ten, Chand has already starred in projects that are very heavy on adult themes, such as the TV series Homeland, the war drama Lone Survivor, and now this. Needless to say, he handles these challenges remarkably for such a young kid. In Bad Words, his first comedy film (I’m not counting Jack and Jill), Chand has to say and hear words his real-life parents likely haven’t said within his earshot, and yet, he gets by on his incredible timing and wit that he brings. For such a young actor, who has already held down roles in very diverse projects, he’s on his way and may even become one of the best child actors of the new decade.

Apropos of nothing, but as someone who loves paying attention to the taglines on movie posters, I’ll say that Bad Words has one of the most memorable. “The end justifies the mean” couldn’t be more fitting in both respects: to words themselves and to the plot of the film.

In case not enough blatant words and forewarnings have been put to use by now, I’ll stress them here: Bad Words is a wildly vulgar comedy, heavy on the language, raunchy in its situational comedy, and ill-mannered for the entirety of its 88-minute runtime. It’s also one of the funniest comedies of 2014 thus far.

Starring: Jason Bateman, Rohan Chand, and Kathryn Hahn. Directed by: Jason Bateman.