[NOTE: This review is based on the director’s cut.]
It’s a common trope in Christmas films that the villain should be someone who hates Christmas. Someone who absolutely can’t stand the decorations, the presents or the sentiments of the holiday. Ebenezer Scrooge and the Grinch are probably the most famous examples, but you’ll find them in most any dime-a-dozen Christmas kids’ film as well. Now, this is all well and good in a kids’ film, where one-dimensional and cartoonish characters are the norm. But the grown-up in me has always wondered just how anyone could hate Christmas to such a degree. How could any three-dimensional person hate Christmas as much as the Grinch did?
Meet Willie Soke, the namesake of Bad Santa.
Willie has a million reasons to hate Christmas, most of them involving his job. The guy’s an ace vaultcracker who’s partnered with a midget named Marcus. Together, they work all December as a shopping mall Santa and an elf, until they rob the mall on the 24th and get away clean. It’s actually quite an intricate operation. Unfortunately, their M.O. means that Willie has to put up with so many hundreds of kids and their parents all day, every day of the month. Marcus tries to make the Santa gig work, but it’s no use: Not only does Willie hate this job, he’s terrible at it.
To start with, Willie doesn’t even look the part. Not only is he way too thin and not nearly old enough, but the guy doesn’t even have a real beard (seriously, when was the last time you saw a shopping mall Santa that didn’t have a real beard?). He’s also a hopeless alcoholic and a chronic potty-mouth, yet the malls keep hiring him because he comes with a real midget and they both work for peanuts.
Plainly and simply, Willie is a fuckup. Lonely, self-destructive and angry at the world. A man so toxic and depressed that he pisses off everyone he talks to, including and especially his partner in crime. He takes a job every year that needs him to be bright and energetic all day for a solid month, but he’s so miserable that he can’t even pretend to care. He never explicitly states it and it’s certainly not to the usual cackling, villainous degree seen in some other movies of the genre, but it’s obvious: This guy hates Christmas.
In any other movie, we’d get some character development for Willie so that he’d end the movie full of Christmas spirit. Not here. The guy starts the movie as a sack of shit and he ends the movie pretty much the same way. Still, there are a couple of supporting characters to help him along and I’ll grant that with their help, he’s not nearly as bad off at the conclusion as he is at the start.
One of these characters is the love interest, Sue. She’s at least half-Jewish, so the holiday of Christmas has a certain forbidden and mysterious appeal to her. This manifests itself as a Santa fetish and I swear I am not making that up. Anyway, Sue latches onto Willie for obvious reasons, but she doesn’t really seem to see him. She just sees the suit and all the connotations that go with it. Obviously, he must be a really sweet guy that loves Christmas and loves kids, blah blah blah. Of course none of this is true, but Willie pretends to go along with it so he can keep boning Lauren Graham.
Anyway, though Sue is an interesting character with some solid comedic moments, she isn’t the main cause of change in Willie’s life over the course of this movie. No, that would be a boy that appears halfway through the first act, whom I’ll just call “The Kid.” I’m loathe to disclose his real name since The Kid is so pathetic that even his name is worth a laugh. This kid is such a failure that he goes way past funny and right back around to being pitiful. The Kid is fat, ugly, snot-nosed, socially incompetent and borderline retarded. He’s obviously a bully magnet, but I don’t see why any bully would bother with him: This boy is so dense and such an easy target that there can’t possibly be any fun in giving him a hard time.
But the saddest thing of all is that he has to be such a colossal loser for story purposes. Remember, Willie is constantly spewing perpetual hatred toward himself and everyone around him… and the story needs him to feel sympathy for someone. Obviously, the dynamic couldn’t work unless the “someone” is even lower than he is, which is quite a scary thought in itself. The premise demanded that this kid be such a hopeless, bottom-of-the-barrel playground reject that not even Willie could help feeling sorry for him. And that’s what we’ve got in The Kid.
The dynamic between these two characters is a very strange one. Initially, The Kid asks Willie a lot of critical questions about life as Santa Claus. Perfectly reasonable questions like “Where’s your reindeer?” “Why is your beard fake?” “Why aren’t you driving a sleigh?” and so on. It seems like this kid is trying to trick Willie into admitting that he really isn’t Santa, but it eventually becomes obvious that he just really wants to know. The Kid seems to believe that this transparent scumbag who doesn’t look or act a thing like the genuine article is actually Saint Nick himself. All the while, Willie responds with thinly-veiled impatience, implying that The Kid is stupid for not knowing the common truth that Santa Claus doesn’t really exist. Is The Kid really that stupid or is he just willfully deluding himself so he can maintain the only pleasant fantasy he’s got? It turns out to be neither, and that really affects Willie when the time comes.
So, you’d expect Willie and The Kid to have a sort of surrogate father/son relationship, right? Well, that’s not exactly what happens. Sure, Willie does give a few lectures on his own peculiar brand of self-esteem, but it’s impossible to tell if any of them take hold. Also, when he learns about the bullies that are giving The Kid a hard time, he doesn’t teach The Kid self-defense or inspire him to stand up for himself. No, he goes out and beats up the bullies hisownself. I’ll repeat that: A middle-aged drunkard does an act of kindness by beating the shit out of a grade-school bully. That’s the kind of character development we get in this movie.
And speaking of antagonists, we’ve got a few of them in this movie. There’s Lois, the shrill and ugly harpy girlfriend to Marcus, who steals tons of merchandise for her. There’s also Bob Chipeska, the wimpy and hopelessly PC mall manager played by John Ritter in his swan song role. But foremost among them is Gin, the mall’s head security guard, played by the dearly departed Bernie Mac. This guy is a hardass who knows that he’s smarter and tougher than the guy he’s working for. So naturally, Gin double-crosses Chipeska at the first opportunity, ruling everyone involved with an iron fist. But naturally, Marcus and Lois fight back, showing just how cold and ruthless they really are.
The actors in this movie are all wonderful. Lauren Graham is very sweet, Jason Ritter is perfectly nebbish, Bernie Mac brings just the right amount of dickish intimidation and all of them make their roles funny. Tony Cox also nails his role as Marcus, perfectly treading that line between concern and aggravation with Willie. But of course, it’s Billy Bob Thornton that steals the show. He brings Willie Soke to vivid life, perfectly depicting this despicable shell of a man while at the same time making him funny and enjoyable to watch. That’s no mean feat, but Thornton pulls it off brilliantly.
The writing is quite peculiar, but in a good way. The dialogue is extremely crude, with explicit sexual talk and dialogue so filled with dirty language, you’d think the cast and crew were getting paid by the four-letter word. Still, there’s no denying that while this comedy is extremely dark, it’s also extremely funny, mostly due to how the film takes something familiar and joyful, then contrasting it with the crudeness of the action onscreen. The score is a great example of this, juxtaposing favorite Christmas songs and familiar classical masterpieces against the crime and debauchery onscreen. Playing the William Tell Overture over a scene of wild sex in the passenger seat of a beater car is perhaps my favorite example.
Far more prominently, the movie contrasts the Grinchiness of our lead with the role that he’s playing. This is the basis for pretty much all of the film’s humor and the crux of the entire movie. You’d think that a film about a crooked Santa would be nothing more than a giant “Bah, Humbug!” and a rebuke of the Christmas spirit, but that isn’t this movie at all.
Instead, the movie employs the myth of Santa Claus as a symbol for all the joy and generosity and magic that we associate with Christmas, especially during childhood. Throughout the movie, The Kid, Chipeska and countless children and parents look to Willie to be that symbol, but he doesn’t put in an iota of effort to be that symbol. It visibly traumatizes the kids and angers the parents to surprisingly comedic effect. More importantly, it reinforces the point that Willie is a bastard. This movie never, ever lets Willie off the hook for being such a piss-poor Santa and every possible homage is paid to Saint Nick and all he represents (especially during a hilarious plot point at the film’s conclusion). Therefore, in showing the Christmas spirit next to its polar opposite, this film makes the former look even brighter by comparison.
Bad Santa is the perfect movie for adults who are bored of seeing the same old Christmas movies year after year. It’s a wonderfully acted black comedy that celebrates Christmas by showing us a true Grinch and making him a pathetic laughingstock. The plot takes a distant backseat to the comedy and there’s an especially large plot hole at the end (just what was in that letter, anyway?), but at least the comedy is effective. If you can stand a heaping helping of crude humor with your holiday cheer, give this one a look.