erhaps the largest selling point in this film, for most people, was how shocking and wrong it was. Drunk playing Santa, insulting kids, passing out, pissing himself, wearing the Santa suit to get sex, robbing the stores in which he works, and cursing start to finish, completely non-stop.  This is probably the most profane and verbally obscene movie I've ever seen and that is, of course the whole joke.

The problem is that I didn't find it that shocking, and therefore didn't find it that funny. I could appreciate it, and it's got a lot better plot than I expected going in, but I didn't find it "dirty" and get the giggles for that reason. So I laughed occasionally and smiled a lot, while some other, more offended people howled with laughter the entire time.  I didn't dislike the movie, but that's my excuse for not finding it as funny as many other critics did.

I'm writing this intro and the categorized scoring below in in July 2004, and I have not seen Bad Santa since I first saw it in the theaters last December, so in theory the numbers below are approximately what they would have been during my first impression.

Movies
Script/Story: 7
Acting/Casting: 8
Humor: 6
Eye Candy: 4
Fun Factor: 5
Replayability: 5
Overall: 6.5

As with all comedies, the ultimate score has to be primarily based on how much the movie made me laugh or not. Bad Santa didn't make me laugh very much, but it didn't bore me, and it had much more of a plot than I went in expecting. That got it about an extra point. If I'd been offended by much of it and therefore laughed more, it would have gone up another point or so. I do want to see the unrated, extended edition Badder Santa DVD, and might update this review after I do, if it changes my opinion of things in any way. 

December 4, 2003

Bad Santa review.

This review is slightly spoilery, in terms of the early plot elements, all of which are given away in the trailer.  I won't be spoilery in terms of the jokes or gags, which are what you're really going to the movie to see, and most of which are also given away in the trailer.

All in all, I wish I hadn't seen the trailer, since it ruined most of the best jokes.  However without the good trailer I wouldn't have wanted to see the movie in the first place.  Ahh, cruel irony.

Bad Santa was a pretty good movie.  Better as a "movie" than I had expected, but less funny than I had hoped.  I would have been happier with a more slap-dash vignette sort of film, with more things that made me laugh.  I chuckled quite a bit, but didn't have any really loud laughs that I can remember.  And I wanted to laugh, really I did.  I was prepared to injure myself via hilarity.

The plot involves a drunken safe-cracker who teams up with a black midget for one job a year; when they clean out the safe at whatever large department store they get to hire them to perform as Santa. The elf (midget/little person/dwarf/whatever) hides inside the store after closing, then raced to hit the disarm code on the store alarm before it turns on. He then lets in Santa (Billy Bob Thorton) who cracks the safe while the elf cleans out the merchandise elsewhere in the store, working mostly from a list that his annoying girlfriend has put together during her time browsing the store in the weeks before the robbery.

This is entirely plausible, if you can ignore the fact that department store Santas have limited hours and leave long before the store closes, if you believe that department stores have one single alarm that if turned off won't trigger any sort of back up, that they don't have motion detectors or night watchmen on patrol, if you believe that the stores wouldn't get fingerprints and other evidence from the safe that was cracked, and so on.

That's really the subplot though, since the meat of the movie is comedy starring the outrageously foul-mouthed and filthy titular "bad santa" as he anally screws fat chicks in the plus sizes dressing room, drinks perpetually, passes out on the floor, vomits in the snow, beats up a burro statue (that several critics have rather inexplicably called a reindeer) in front of a full line of kids and their mothers, drives drunk, curses out everyone in sight, is cursed out by his elf, beats up a skate board punk, and so on.  It's a relentlessly course and foul movie, filled with innumerable "fucks" and "shits" and "motherfuckers" and every other bad word you can think of and some you cant'.  And yes, it's a crying shame that the CAP Alerts guy isn't going to do a review.

The humor in the movie is open to interpretation. By that I mean what you find funny will vary depending on what you find funny.

I'm pretty jaded and evil, so the scenes of an unshaven guy in a Santa suit slobbering salad while he screams at a woman who wanted some special attention for her kid, or pissing himself while on the Santa throne, or cursing non-stop at his elf assistant, or repeatedly asking cute little kids, "What the fuck do you want?" didn't really amuse me.  I got a slight, "Damn that's so wrong." sort of thrill, but that wore off pretty quickly, and while I could appreciate how wrong they were trying to make it, and how wrong some people would probably find it, I didn't actually think it was funny.

There are also many, many physical jokes.  People taking falls, Santa kicking empty bottles out of his stolen car, Santa beating a burro statue to death, Santa smacking around punk kids, balls being kicked/punched in comedic fashion, an apparently dead granny suddenly sitting up, and so on.  Lots of those were funny, others were at least amusing.  It wasn't hilariously crashingly violent, like say Austin vs. Mini-me in Austin Powers 3 (and yes, that was the only really funny thing in the film the first time I saw it), but I laughed several times at the physical humor.

One thing I did like was that they didn't play the fact that the midget was a midget for laughs.  Oh, there were a few times that he was funny just for being tiny, but not many.  Mostly he was just another character who was funny (or not) on his own merits. I wouldn't say that I forgot he was 3 feet tall, but it wasn't the be all and end all of his movie existence. One time he was drinking with Santa, who of course could put it down like water, and when Santa criticized his ability to drink he said, "I weight 97 pounds!"  And it's a good point, when you consider it in terms of "how fast he's going to get drunk."  He regularly grabbed things to use when he had to reach something a normal person could, but he couldn't, and it just seemed natural; like I was almost proud of him for so smoothly adapting to and overcoming his height limitation.

My attitude is ridiculous, of course.  It's like being proud of a blind person for learning Braille or memorizing the location of furniture in their home; what's their alternative?  But it was neat to see how smoothly the dwarf character did what needed to be done, and I was glad there wasn't any scene of him lying on his back, pathetically wiggling his vestigial little paws, ala Mini Me.

There was also quite a bit of verbal humor, mostly of the inventively profane style.  Bernie Mac (who apparently signed a contract in 2001 requiring him to appear in every single movie made in the United States) gives this a try, most famously in a long curse fest against the elf, who has an astonishingly foul mouth himself.  There are also some very funny back and forth conversations between Santa and the weird fat little kid who begins stalking him, most of which are played in the trailer.  Santa's girlfriend is pretty funny also, though she's about 20 years too young and 10 points too attractive to be with Santa, at least until you remember that Santa was snogging Angelina Jolie until quite recently.  Yes, that makes my head hurt too.

John Ritter is in the movie as well, in his final film role, and while I didn't find him funny, I can imagine that some people would.  He plays the very uptight and prissy store manager who suspects something, and turns the investigation over to his unsavory (and relatively unbelievable) security chief, played by Bernie Mac.

Ritter's main thing in the movie is to stutter and look uneasy as he tries to explain the profane words or deeds he witnessed Santa engaging in, which Bernie Mac then repeats back to him, reveling in the profanity and his boss' evident disease with it. And if you didn't know better, you might think that Ritter had dropped dead in the middle of filming, since he's around constantly in the middle of the film, before vanishing, never to return, at about the 2/3 point.  I didn't miss him, but I did notice that he was gone.

The acting throughout the film was pretty damn good.  You could quibble with some of the things they did; Santa seemed impossibly drunk, but more on that later.  His girlfriend with the Santa fetish seemed way, way too understanding and into such a sleazy guy, not to mention too young and cute for him, but we're supposed to accept that she's motivated by a fetish.  And perhaps the sex is that good; Santa's got to last a long time (assuming he can ever get it up to begin with) with that much alcohol in his system.  Plus she's a bartender and is obviously used to (if strangely tolerant/encouraging of) drunks.  Plus she puts down the liquor like a champ when given the chance, so I'd say she's well on her way to fall down drunk as well. But she still seemed too understanding and interested in the scum bag of a Santa she was with.  I figured she'd bang him a few times, get over her "Fuck me Santa." issues and move on to greener pastures.

Bernie Mac's character wasn't at all believable to me as a security guy; there's one scene of him busting some shoplifting kid, but his metrosexual clothing and oral fetishes (always smoking, eating oranges, etc) and unprofessional behavior seemed ridiculous.  However that doesn't mean that he wasn't an interesting character to watch on the screen.  Santa did a good job staying loathsomely drunk and crude and sour the entire time, regularly blowing up over nothing at all, the way real live drunks do (I guess).  His scenes of destruction and fucking up and breaking things in a drunken rage were damn convincing, as were his scenes of remorse and self-loathing when he came to the next day and saw what he'd done.

But the best acting in the movie, possibly excluding Billy Bob's, was by the kid.  He was 8 and snot-nosed and oblivious and sweet and clueless and hopeless and uplifting and adorable and obnoxious and relentless and almost zen-like in his singularity of purpose.  It was really a great job by any actor, much less a child one, and while he doesn't have to carry the movie, he has to hold his own with this rampaging weirdo of a Santa clause in numerous long scenes while acting only with his voice and very subtle facial expressions and body poses.  It's not the sort of role and not the sort of movie that would ever get any Academy Award attention, and I'm not saying Santa or the kid deserved one, but if their performances hadn't been spot on, the movie would have been a disaster. And it wasn't a masterpiece, but it wasn't a disaster. 

It's also got that Holiday Spirit, with a much better and happier ending that I'd anticipated, but you've also got to sort of believe in magic to enjoy the plot, or at least suspend your disbelief in terms of rational, analytical thought about much of the plot.  I mentioned some of the problems with their whole department store heist tactics above, but there were many other things that would never have happened in the real world.  The biggest of those was the entire ending; I mean like the last 15 minutes, which just could have never, ever happened.  But if you relax and go along with things in the spirit of all good Xmas movies, you'll probably do okay.

I'm ordinarily very nit picky and critical of that sort of thing, and I was able to swallow it, while watching.  It was only afterwards when I thought back about the movie that the ridiculous implausibilities began to mount.

The other thing that I took away from the movie was the stark portrait of what a drunk is really like. You see lots of movies with drunks, but they're almost always the comical bum on a park bench who witnesses something supernatural and looks at his bottle in amazement before dropping it, presumably to swear off the devil's piss evermore.  Or you see people who are probably alcoholics, like say Marian in Indiana Jones 1 (the only good Indy movie, IMHO, which is why I've got no interest in owning the box set) but who are fine and never impaired by their excessive consumption. Or else you see some character get drunks and flop about comically, forgets where he lives, forgets his name, forgets how to walk, etc, with no consequences for his actions.

Santa in Bad Santa is a drunk, and it's not pretty. It's comical at times, in a falling down physical way, but mostly it's just nasty and unpleasant, and relentless.  He's not drunk once and then all better; he's drunk every night and he wakes up every morning with a bottle in his hand or in the bed next to him.  He shows up to work every day drunk and out of control, he's cruel to everyone out of his own pain, he's insensitive and unable to control his impulses, and he hates himself for it.

I'm sure there have been lots of movies about drunks who were just as bad as him, but I found Bad Santa to be almost a Scared Straight style warning about falling into the bottle.  The drinking in the movie is never happy or celebratory, even when it tries to be, since you always know what it's going to lead at least one of the characters to.  The elf rages at Santa numerous times about what a loser and a drunk and a piece of shit he is, and Santa doesn't like it, but he hardly argues back, and by the end of the film you'll realize that the elf was exactly correct. Santa is a drunken piece of shit, and he knows it and he wants to die.

Whether or not he gets his wish or changes... you'll have to see the film to discover for yourself.

Pre Movie Discussion

November 25, 2003

You may have heard vaguely about the upcoming movie Bad Santa.  I heard about it since various conservative pundits (scroll down) were whining about how horrible it was for Miramax (owned by Disney) to make a movie where Santa is presented as less than wholesome and saintly.  I'm not sure why this is newsworthy, the movie is called "Bad Santa" and it's rated R; do they think 5 year olds are going to be flocking to it on their own and getting disillusioned or what? One take is that this is another example of the right wing's hatred for Disney, and this article in the Salt Lake Tribune makes some valid points on that front.

Personally, I think it sounds damn funny, and want to see it and want it to do well just to piss off the idiots who can't seem to differentiate between a movie about a guy who plays Santa Claus for department stores and the jovial Christmas character who children believe in and love. I'm not sure I want my kids believing in Santa anyway, assuming I ever have kids; why should they thank some mythical figure in a red suit for the presents I worked to earn the money to buy?  Ungrateful little shits.  But I digress.

The slapstick-looking TV commercials don't do much for me, but the trailer is great, I had several LOL moments, and I almost never think actual comedies are funny, certainly not just from their trailers. The overall critical mass is also positive, 67% on Rotten Tomatoes now, although that's based on just 16 reviews.

If you've had it with all that feel-good holiday sludge, hook up with the combustibly nasty Bad Santa. It could become a Christmas perennial for Scrooges of all ages. Billy Bob Thornton is sinfully funny as Willie T. Stokes, a butt-smoking, booze-swilling, hooker-screwing department-store Santa who hates the product-whoring "little shits" who sit on his lap. Why does he do it? He and his elf partner (Tony Cox) rob the malls every year -- the elf crawls through the air vents -- and live off the proceeds.

When Willie (Billy Bob Thornton) wanders onto the screen in his department store Santa costume, you think he’s a little rundown and on the skinny side, but he’s still got to be a good guy because he’s dressed as Santa. He must love kids and have a heart of gold. How wrong you would be. That first impression is blown out of the water the second Willie opens his mouth. Smoking, swearing, drinking, fornicating, fighting and peeing at will, the Naughty list was created with this guy in mind. Kids are like alien creatures to Willie, he’s never met a bottle he didn’t like, and his Santa suit is just a cover he uses to case department stores before robbing them.

That’s the premise and it’s interesting and even pretty original and all that, but the real story of "Bad Santa" is just how ‘bad’ Santa gets. Every other word out of Billy Bob Thornton’s mouth is a four letter one, but believe it or not, it works. It starts out being hysterical and never really loses its shock value throughout the film. When he swears at the loser kid who takes him in and desperately wants to believe in Santa, it’s funny rather than offensive. He calls him every conceivable socially unacceptable label but because he treats everyone that way, it’s all in character, and for him to treat the boy any other way would have been a big letdown. This movie doesn’t pull any punches, setting out to be as offensive as possible, and succeeding because it stays true for the entire length of the film.

If we go see it I'll post my thoughts on it, but then what else would you expect?

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