Summary:

Willie (Billy Bob Thornton) and Marcus (Tony Cox) seek seasonal employment as a department store Santa and his elf.  Their real mission is to gain access to a store after hours and rob its safe, scoring enough money to support them for the rest of the year.  This year, however, things threaten to spiral out of control.

Steve says:

Bad Santa = Bad Movie.   However, I don’t side with those who have gotten their undies in a bundle over the notion of Santa Claus being portrayed as a potty-mouthed, self-loathing, alcoholic womanizer.  First of all: Thornton ’s character isn’t the real Santa.  Second: there is no real Santa.  (Note to readers under the age of six – forget what I just said).

The main reason the movie doesn’t work is that it aims to be a cynical comedy.  A cynical comedy is best left in the hands of someone with a light touch.  If Joel and Ethan Coen, who executive produced BAD SANTA, had also written and directed it, we would have been treated to a much better film.  But director Terry Zwigoff, (GHOST WORLD) lives in a much darker place and it is that very darkness that dooms BAD SANTA from its first scene.

While there are a few good laughs in this movie, most of the audience’s time is spent watching Thornton’s Willie character destroy himself.  It gets old very quickly as Willie – and indeed the entire enterprise – sinks to the level of a one-note undertaking.  This might work as a ten minute sketch on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE but it’s difficult to sustain this downer situation for ninety minutes.

Billy Bob Thornton is always interesting to watch, even when his character is as thoroughly disagreeable as this one.  It’s the very believability of his performance that makes the rest of the movie so difficult to buy.  First and foremost, the idea of anyone being able to obtain, let alone sustain a job as a department store Santa when they are habitually falling-down drunk, reeking of body odor and unable to utter a coherent sentence without a four-letter expletive in it.  The screenwriters came up with a scene in which milquetoast department store manager Bob  Chipeska (the late John Ritter in his last film role) tries to fire Willie and Marcus, but it isn’t any more believable than the rest of this unfortunate saga.

The appealing Lauren Graham (TV’s GILMORE GIRLS) is miscast is a barfly who will do anyone in a Santa suit.  Still, it’s nice to have something appealing in this movie, so her scenes are welcome.

Tony Cox does a good job as Willie’s larcenous dwarf partner.  But any potential appeal for his character goes out the window with the commission of a particularly gruesome murder.  This act seems so out of step with the intended tone of the film that we never quite recover from it.

It’s too bad that John Ritter’s final screen performance had to be in something so far beneath his considerable comedic skills. 

I would love a good movie that takes a revered icon like Santa Claus and has some real fun with it.  But there is precious little (if any) fun to be had here.  BAD SANTA has the stink of a film that tried to be hip and irreverent and missed the mark by a mile. 

BAD SANTA gets two kernels.

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Patty says:

I’d like to disagree with you, Steve, because I’m such a die-hard Billy Bob fan, but it just isn’t in me.  Maybe it’s because we finished trimming our three Christmas trees and unpacking my collection of 436 Santa icons before we left for the theater, but I just couldn’t stomach BAD SANTA. 

Billy Bob was a bad Santa…a bad, new Santa.  I want the old Santa back. Call me a traditionalist, but the idea of anyone’s cherub sitting on the urine-stained, filthy Santa suit worn by an equally unkempt, unshaved, unwashed Santa who uttered the “f” word more often than Colin Farrell is enough to wither the holiday spirit of the most consummate Christmas freak.  I didn’t find it funny. I didn’t enjoy watching the character of the most revered and idolized symbol of the season (speaking in the secular, rather than the religious sense, of course) besmirched by the most common and debased of human flaws. Most of all, the vision of Santa puking cheap liquor in an alley is an image that will chase the most tenacious sugar plum fairies out of my head for a long, long time.

There was an opportunity for a good story here. Christmas is a perfect setting for a well-told morality play.  The problem with this one is that it was too little too late.  By the time Thornton ’s character showed us any possibility of redemption, the audience didn’t give a rip about him.  He was simply a reprehensible human being.  As a matter of fact, it was hard to care about anyone in the film with the possible exception of Lauren Graham as the big hearted barfly with the Santa fetish that apparently overrides her sense of smell.  She is able to overlook Thornton’s bad hygiene, limited vocabulary and the fact that he’s insinuated himself into the lives of a ten year old boy and his senile grandmother. 

Even the kid isn’t loveable.  It’s as though the character is written with no redeeming qualities.  He personifies the phrase “snot nosed kid” except he isn’t smart enough to be snotty.

See BAD SANTA if you need to see what happens to a solid actor when he has to pay divorce attorneys.  Otherwise, spend the cost of the flick and what you’d drop at the concession stand on a toy for a needy child.  Tis’ the season.  Tell em Santa sent you.  The good Santa.

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December 1, 2003