Self-help guru who hated his gym teacher goes home to find his mom engaged to said teacher, stilted merriment tries to ensue. The idea is sound the execution isn't. Woodcock, Billy Bob Thorton's gym teacher character is much too one dimensional to really work since he has one expression the whole time. Sean William Scott as the self help guru tries too hard to be wacky and falls on his face. Actually the script just doesn't work since its so obvious where its going. There are laughs and smiles despite of the lack of it all hanging together, and one "Whoa" nervous "oh crap he really got hurt" laugh towards the end. Worth a look on a slow night on cable where you'll be more forgiving of the dull bits on the way to the good ones.

John Farley (Seann William Scott) is a successful self-help writer going back to his Nebraska hometown to get a local award Corn Cob Key. He tells his callous agent Maggie (Amy Poehler) that the book is about letting go of past trauma like his dead father. However the title comes from his gym coach Jasper Woodcock (Billy Bob Thornton) bullying him. He is shocked when his mother Beverly Farley (Susan Sarandon) reveals that she's dating Woodcock. He falls for former classmate and English teacher Tracy Detweiller (Melissa Sagemiller). With Nedderman (Ethan Suplee) and his brother, the group of Woodcock victims haplessly try to break up the relationship.

Billy Bob Thornton is fine as the cruel Woodcock. Susan Sarandon is playing it too dumb. She doesn't play dumb well. The character has to be less simplistic or they should have gotten somebody different to play the mom. Seann William Scott is simply not funny in this movie. His natural personality is being suppressed. This could still work as a black comedy if it took more chances and be darker.

I have to admit, one of my guilty pleasures is seeing Billy Bob Thornton as a character like Willie in "Bad Santa". He strikes just the right attitude when he's playing your basic low life, delivering caustic barbs with precision timing. That's why I thought "Mr. Woodcock" would hold more promise in the witty one liner department where he gets to play a sadistic high school gym teacher, a role that virtually ensures a parody of similar minded gym teachers and coaches everywhere. Instead, the picture overdoses on the many variations you can come up with using the word 'corn', a veritable cornucopia of corny jokes as it were. See what I mean, there was a lot of that.

Too bad, because the flick held a lot more promise than what it actually delivered, even though I found myself laughing out loud a few times, even once un-corn-trollably. That was when Woodcock took the gurney dive head first into the asphalt, a move that topped even a well placed basketball to the groin, which anyone who ever had a coach like Woodcock would have seen coming a mile away.

You know, as I think back to my own high school days, I had a gym teacher who was a bit like Mr. Woodcock when you come right down to it. He weighed two thirty and was built like a brick wall, crew cut hair and a menacing deadpan look just like Thornton's character. His name was Mr. Green and one of his favorite activities was the rope climb to the ceiling of the gym. If this sounds vaguely familiar to anyone reading this, we might have been in the same gym class together. Drop me a line. And Mr. Green - if you're reading this, I'll deny every word of it.