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Are you sick and tired of strictly by-the-numbers, saccharine-coated Christmas movies and the dozens of trite annual Hallmark holiday offerings? If so, then praise the skies for director Terry Zwigoff's Bad Santa, a no-holds-barred misanthropic black comedy that casually tears apart every cherished Christmas movie cliché and takes a steaming piss on the remains. Crude, vulgar, crass, and side-splittingly hilarious, 2003's Bad Santa is a gleeful kick in the teeth to all warm, wholesome exhibitions of seasonal greetings. Virtually all well-known Christmas films include a character learning an important lesson, but in Bad Santa, the story involves a boy learning to kick bullies in the balls when they pick on him. How's that for Christmas spirit? To an extent, this is a one-joke film, but it's a rip-cracking one with heart and big belly laughs.
A professional thief, Willie Soke (Billy Bob Thornton) is a hard-drinking, heavy-smoking, no-hoper sexaholic with a cynical, careless attitude towards life. Every year, Willie and his partner, an African American dwarf named Marcus (Tony Cox), pull off the perfect scam. Every year, Willie gets a job as a department store Santa Claus, and once the mall closes on Christmas Eve, they disable the alarms and rob the place, cleaning out the safe of all cash therein. They use the loot to live comfortably throughout the following year before returning to pull off another heist at a different mall in another part of the country. But Willie's excessive drinking problem and uncontrollable impulses threaten to ruin the scam with each passing year, especially when his behaviour gravely offends prudish mall manager Bob Chipeska (John Ritter) after they arrive in Phoenix, Arizona. Unsure that Willie should continue to play Santa, Bob brings the pair to the attention of his security chief, Gin (Bernie Mac). Trouble also ensues when circumstances force Willie to move in with Thurman Merman (Brett Kelly), a dimwitted young boy who has no friends, lives with his senile grandmother (Cloris Leachman ), and believes that the frequently intoxicated Willie is the real Santa. Willie also catches the attention of a bartender named Sue (Lauren Graham), who has a Santa fetish.
Bad Santa did not receive its R rating from the MPAA due to three or four uses of the f-word... The whole movie is crude, foul-mouthed, dirty, disturbing and perverted, containing about 150 uses of "fuck" and its variations, as well as several other profanities, sex scenes and explicit sexual dialogue. These characters make Ebenezer Scrooge look like a pleasant, mild-mannered elderly eccentric. Miramax was the only studio bold enough to green-light the film after Universal Studios outright rejected the script, branding it as "the foulest, disgusting, misogynistic, anti-Christmas, anti-children thing we could imagine." Those in the mood for Christmas cheer should rewatch It's a Wonderful Life because Bad Santa is for the crowd fed up with Christmas carols and artificial goodwill. It may be true that Bad Santa manages a happy ending of sorts, but the film has its tongue firmly in cheek for the final scene of faux optimism. Is the film at all realistic? Fuck, no! It is unbelievable that girls (especially teenagers) find a man as seedy as Willie so sexually attractive, and it takes a healthy suspension of disbelief to accept that no mall managers successfully fire Willie since he continually swears in front of the children. But since when have Christmas movies been realistic?
Some will perceive Bad Santa as mean-spirited and offensive, which is more than justified. But that is a point of praise since Zwigoff and screenwriters Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (their second screenplay after 2001's Cats & Dogs) designed the film to shock. The film shows Willie urinating in his suit in the first five minutes, and the contempt he harbours for the world and everybody around him is almost unsettling. The character is almost beyond redemption: he is foul, misanthropic and downright pathetic, a prick who shows no restraint as he fires off venomous language to child after child without even flinching. But he also hates himself, which is why he lashes out so viciously when pushed. In an absolute desecration of Christmas film convention, the character never undergoes a forced, Scrooge-esque third-act epiphany before becoming kind and wholesome. Similarly, Thurman goes against every "cute movie kid" cliché imaginable: instead of chubby-cute, he is disconcertingly obese and impossibly blank. For most of the movie, the kid relentlessly questions Willie about the North Pole and Mrs. Claus but only receives verbal abuse in response. However, it never appears to register or hurt the child, as his immediate instinct is to offer Willie some sandwiches.
Willie's alcohol-fuelled descent into personal self-destruction is at times hysterical but at other times sad, and it is a testament to Zwigoff's nuanced direction and Thornton's spot-on performance that the character never feels overplayed or contrived. Thornton was born for this role, memorably playing the last guy you would like to see donning Santa's big red suit and sitting in a department store talking to children. According to Thornton, the actor was genuinely inebriated at various points throughout filming, further amplifying his performance and representing a hilarious piece of film trivia. Alongside Thornton, Tony Cox is pitch-perfect as the frequently furious and exasperated Marcus, spouting the vulgar dialogue with utmost power and venom. Meanwhile, young Brett Kelly clearly understands what it takes to portray a dork, and his performance is surprisingly naturalistic. Bernie Mac (R.I.P.) is his usual larger-than-life self as the security chief whose dialogue with the late John Ritter constitutes some of the film's funniest moments. Ritter died shortly after filming, and the movie is dedicated to his memory.
With studios releasing as many extended cuts as possible in the early 2000s for home video exhibition, an unrated edition of Bad Santa emerged on DVD and Blu-ray with an additional seven minutes of footage. However, the studio did not consult Zwigoff while assembling this version, and the filmmaker later oversaw a Director's Cut that actually removes footage and is shorter than the theatrical edition. The unrated edition is the most widely available version of the film, and it is this reviewer's preferred cut, as the added material (most notably a scene in a boxing ring) is hilarious and indispensable.
The biggest success of Bad Santa is the way it delivers line upon line of boundlessly witty, endlessly quotable and hysterically funny dialogue. The movie is a riot from beginning to end, and the replay value is through the roof. Upon viewing the film for the 50th time, it will still cause you to contort in fits of laughter. In fact, you may continue to embrace the movie more and more with each new viewing. Furthermore, Zwigoff infuses Bad Santa with a quality Hollywood continually neglects while producing conventional Christmas romps: heart. Willie does not necessarily become a better person by the end of the story, but his friendship with Thurman is genuinely touching. A perennial Christmas Eve tradition for this reviewer, Bad Santa is the best Christmas film since Christmas Vacation and Die Hard, both of which also provide an alternative to more traditional, upbeat festive viewing.
8.6/10
