Bad Santa | Review

Oh what fun it is to ride on Zwigoff’s sleigh.

Like serving yourself a glass of fruit punch that you happen to know is spiked, you might like the little buzz at the start but no the hangover at the end. For those out there who detest the holidays, then this foul mouthed marathon will warm your tummy up—think It’s A Wonderful Life but into a blender with some Jack Daniels.

While Elf chewed up the charts with its tune for the holiday spirits, this newest is strictly for adults and non-church goers. Director Terry Zwigoff’s comedy couldn’t be anymore politically incorrect with this film about a-holes talking about their a-holes, which centers around one sad drunk department store man in a red suit and a cast of other irregular characters.

Billy Bob Thornton ( Intolerable Cruelty ) plays a one time per year criminal using his Santa gear as a ploy to get in tight with store operations. Apparently, this Santa has substituted the gift of giving by the pleasures of receiving, stealing and boozing it up. As he takes to one kid we find out that beneath the carcass is a beating heart–perhaps a faint signal though.

Generally Zwigoff loves to explore the vulnerability of his characters, but here humanity gets diced with an easy humor of exaggerated characterizations made funny by kids with a wedgies and a weight problem. Instead of showing us a cruelness that would match the brilliance behind a film like American Splendor we end up with a sort of lingo that is familiar to a Farrelly’s bros. films. While Zwigoff resorts to a language of sight gags mostly with props or almost dead grandmothers, it’s what the characters actually say in terms of a South Park dialogue that provides this film with its darkly funny outbursts.

In his exaggerated size, the snot-nosed kid of the picture (Brett Kelly) clashes perfectly with the unsympathetic Thornton character, his disillusionment about Santa and the fact that he just manages to pop up from the blue makes his droopy presence very much enjoyable. The theme of ‘believing in someone’ or something spirit gets transferred from the drunk Santa and the child one learns the spirit of giving while the other leans how to kickbox his way out of trouble, his finger at the end tells us that some people in his position manage to make it in the end. The Santa sidekick (Tony Cox-Me, Myself & Irene) whose mouth is so bad that one bar of soap wouldn’t suffice as punishment has one of the funniest scenes in an exchange with Bernie Mac (Ocean’s Eleven). John Ritter’s last screen presence shows his versatility as an actor, leaving his performance with Thornton in Sling Blade as his best one in recent memory.

Perhaps this may be a nice present to parents who’ve had to endure their child’s countless reruns of Tim Allen’s take on the man with rosy cheeks, while Bad Santa is good for a couple of laughs it will be a long wait in-between films for Zwigoff fans who might want to stick to his prior films worthy of multiple viewings in Ghost World and Crumb.

Rating 2.5 stars