Bad Santa (2003)
Directed by: Terry Zwigoff
Starring Billy Bob Thornton, and produced by, amongst others, Harvey Weinstein, and Joel and Ethan Coen – with all that talent, the real Christmas miracle on display here is that Bad Santa is so bad. It veers between sentimental comedy and feel-bad film, with TV-movie lighting (its colour-palette spans the pastel-pink to muddy-brown gamut of the shopping-mall world in which it is set) and, sadly, generally weak acting.
A 99-minute film can’t afford to waste as much time getting going as this one does, but after introducing us to permanently pissed Santa Willie (Thornton) and his diminutive partner-in-crime Marcus (Tony Cox) who rob the department stores whose Christmas grottos they staff, the movie dawdles through the first half hour, including a totally unnecessary excursion to Florida.
Things don’t really improve once the crooks reunite in department store-land. There are only so many times that seeing Santa turn up drunk to the grotto can be funny, or wistful (depending on your mood), and this flick exceeds that quota many times over.
The increasingly unreliable Santa attracts unlikely love interest in the form of Sue (attractive-but-underused Lauren Graham), and an admirer: a desperate-for-attention picked-on kid (Brett Kelly). From then on it’s standard mid-western philosophy. The kid starts to melt Santa’s heart (or at least his liver), and Santa teaches the kid that the solution to his problems is to beat up his enemies. (He gets to do this when, uniquely in this film, his chief enemy turns up alone. In reality, his knockout blow to the gang’s leader would have been followed by the the rest of the gang turning him to pulp).
A cartoonishly depicted climactic heist goes wrong, and it all ends bloodily. But then the film’s makers tack on another ending, in which Santa’s bullet-riddled body turns out not have been that badly injured, and he gets to deliver a voiceover plot-resolution that just seems lazily written.
Special mention should go to Bernie Mac’s turn as a store security chief – a wonderfully OTT character and performance, which, sadly, can’t rescue this Christmas turkey.
i loved this movie.
yes, i admit it.
i’m also willing to admit i have some fairly low-brow tastes when it comes to movies . . . as such, i’m equally willing to accept many of your criticisms about “bad santa”. most, in fact.
but i don’t think it’s fair to say things that start with “in reality” . . . seems to me, we either accept we must suspend disbelief or not. doesn’t seem right to pick and choose.
one thing is–as you’ve previously explained–cracks in a movie’s internal logic, and another is sporadic disbelief.
the part about the kid encountering his nemesis alone, sans evil posse, is, in my humble opinion, in step with the movie’s own internal logic. after all, who’d believe a guy like thornton could land a girl like graham?! that never happens in real life either.
wait.
i see your point.
never mind.