Mr. Woodcock is hit and miss right from the beginning; although anyone who's ever seen a movie before will be 15 minutes ahead of it the whole time, there are a number of genuine laughs, particularly in the early scenes before the energy dwindles away. Thornton, Sarandon, and Scott are all game, but it's a one-joke movie where the joke is constantly flubbed by Craig Gillespie's pedestrian direction. His decision to shoot the film in a widescreen aspect ratio is a mystery, given that most of the time he never moves the camera back further than the actors' heads—the movie is so heavy on close-ups that I was shocked when, a half-hour into the story, a wide shot revealed that Sarandon and Scott actually had arms and legs. The claustrophobic compositions work against the tone of light comedy, as the actors' faces are shoved at us in sweaty, unflattering close-ups in which they're completely disconnected from their surroundings and each other.

It's too bad, because Alison Sadler's production design and the often amusing script by Michael Carnes and Josh Gilbert actually provide a surprisingly specific sense of place: the small town where Woodcock reigns is nicely conveyed through expressive visual details and witty dialogue. The problem is Gillespie's awkward style and weak sense of timing, which distance the characters from their own setting. Gillespie—or the studio executives and test screening audiences who are more likely the real auteurs of the film—flattens everything out into an even, fast, monotonous pace in which no particular scene or moment is given more dramatic emphasis than another. Every scene is staged and edited the same way, so there's no comic or emotional weight, and the movie floats into the air (and out of the viewer's mind) the second it's over.

Yet Mr. Woodcock does manage to squeak by on the appeal of its performers and the universal appeal of its core idea. At its best, as in the numerous scenes in which Woodcock rips into his students, it effectively evokes the humiliations and fears of adolescence in a manner that's both truthful and hilarious. Unfortunately, the filmmakers don't trust their premise enough to follow through on it, and instead constantly derail the movie with inane gags and pointless digressions (like an unfunny subplot involving Amy Poehler as Farley's high-strung editor). The actors all deserve better: though Thornton has done this kind of thing before in movies like School For Scoundrels and Bad Santa, he refuses to phone his performance in, and Sarandon and Scott make noble attempts at infusing some degree of truth into their portrayals. In the end, though, the movie isn't worthy of their efforts—it's a two-minute trailer unsuccessfully stretched into an 87-minute feature film.