Release Date: November 26, 2003
Starring: Billy Bob Thornton, Bernie Mac, Tony Cox, John Ritter, Lauren Graham, Brett Kelly
Directed by: Terry Zwigoff
Written by: Glenn Ficarre, John Requa
Distributed by: Miramax Films
MPAA Rating: R (strong pervasive language, sexual content, violence)
Having an embittered and hostile outlook on life can be a funny thing for a film character to possess -- Jack Nicholson’s outstanding role in As Good As It Gets immediately comes to mind. It’s potentially a rare comedic treat, then, to see an utterly pessimistic and indignant man like Bad Santa’s Willie T. Stokes (Billy Bob Thorton) working as a mall Santa Claus. But in the midst of a terrible screenplay and a shameless amount of vulgarity, among other things, it’s really not funny at all.
Bad Santa is a dark comedy that goes beyond dark. It’s an offensive picture that has an expletive written into nearly every sentence, unnatural characters who hate themselves, and a moronic plot. To director Terry Zwigoff (Ghost World)’s credit, though, going against the mainstream is his style. If only this film had more imaginaton in it, we might all be able to laugh along with him.
The story is based on a concept by executive producers Joel and Ethan Coen, two masters of dark comedy who, it’s safe to say, have done an uncommon thing and slipped up here. Willie T. Stokes and Marcus (Tony Cox) are partners in crime who, come Christmas time, rob malls while posing as Santa Clause and his elf. Willie is an alcoholic loser and all around awful human being, and his first words of narration are actually very funny because he’s describing his life as a mock Santa while dropping in plenty of curse words. However, it’s when he continues this crass attitude in front of small children that both he and the movie lose any semblance of respectability.
The movie never misses a chance to ignore redemption. A young boy (Brett Kelly) comes into the picture and tries to befriend the disgruntled Willie. That boy is an overweight young man who dresses in high shorts, never wipes his nose, and is always picked on by bullies. Had Billy Bob Thornton’s character at least tried to be a decent person at some point -- instead of doing things like urinating on himself while a line of anxious children wait to tell him what they want for Christmas -- there would be a lot more depth to his character and to the movie as a whole. The audience would have reason to hope he would help the young boy’s unfortunate situation.
"The Kid," as he’s listed in the credits, is so desperate for a friend (especially one he thinks is the real Santa Claus) that he puts up with Thornton’s disgusting behavior: he never seems to change out of his grimy and understuffed Santa outfit; he doesn’t bother to compose himself around anyone, much less children; he swears twice as much as a Quentin Tarantino character; and he is so reliant on alcohol that he’ll even drink a warm, half-empty bottle of beer the minute he wakes up. At one point, Thorton is about to kill himself in a garage with carbon monoxide and he’s not even ashamed of himself when the kid catches him.
Certain people, like the Coen brothers and comedian George Carlin, for example, have been able to harness this type of negative humor and twist it into a genuinely funny thing. Bad Santa, though, abandons creativity, completely crosses the line of bad taste, and throws it all in our laps as if to disrespect the audience as much as it does its characters.
Like an immature Adam Sandler comedy or a Farrelly brothers film gone bad, Bad Santa dispenses with any sort of story structure and lets the jokes drive the plot. There’s something about Thorton and his partner being discovered as thieves by a mall detective (played by the seldom seen Bernie Mac), but that element doesn’t last long enough to be worth understanding. There’s a romance between Thorton and a bartender (Lauren Graham) that makes hardly any sense. And we’re simply supposed to believe that The Kid lives alone with his senile grandmother in a big, beautiful house, just waiting to have a drunken Santa Claus as a house guest.
Good comedies with similarly goofy plots get by on solid humor and interesting characters. Bad Santa has none of the first and hardly any of the second. This could be the type of film Terry Zwigoff was trying to create, as if holding up a middle finger to Hollywood and anyone with holiday spirit. Whether people like Billy Bob Thorton and the late John Ritter, in his last silver screen appearance, intentionally helped that cause, however, is uncertain. But what can be said for sure is that Bad Santa is not a good movie even if you can stomach its awful sense of humor.
-- Andy Zientek (zfilm@earthlink.net)