Review: Bad Santa

NOTE: This post is a review of the “Badder Santa” version of Bad Santa available on DVD.

We’re in the midst of the Christmas special season on television. For weeks now, Charlie Brown, Rudolph, Frosty, Virginia, and others have been spreading cheer designed for small children. If you’re an adult looking for a different kind of cheer, Bad Santa may have enough bitter and sour to balance the sweet that’s currently permeating the airwaves.

Billy Bob Thornton plays Willie, a professional safecracker and unprofessional mall Santa who swears, drinks, swears, has sex with any woman who’s willing, swears, drinks, and swears. He’s a wreck. His partner in crime, Marcus (Tony Cox), is the brains behind the operation. After the job that opens the movie, Willie thinks he’s got enough money to retire to Miami. Marcus predicts that Willie will drink his share and need to do another job next year. Obviously Marcus is correct, or there wouldn’t be a movie.

At the next job, Willie encounters a shy 8-year-old boy (Brett Kelly) who’s the object of bullying. The scenes with the kid avoid the saccharine sweetness and unearned redemption that might be expected from lesser films depicting this kind of relationship. Willie’s too far gone to be redeemed completely, and “Bad Santa” leaves the audience somewhat concerned for the kid’s future with Willie as an important influence in his life.

Bad Santa features John Ritter and Bernie Mac in pivotal supporting roles. Despite the underwritten dialogue, the prickly relationship between Ritter’s prudish mall executive and Mac’s corrupt security chief provide both actors with ample opportunities to squeeze laughs out of lines that easily could have fallen flat. Ritter, in one of his last roles, steals nearly every scene he’s in.

The characters that populate Bad Santa don’t find the joy of Christmas that saved Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol and George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. They find a different kind of joy, and they elicit laughs by engaging in behaviors not usually associated with the holiday season. If the usual Christmas movie is a mug of hot cocoa, Bad Santa is a fifth of gin.

This review was written by L.R. Simon