Review: Bad Santa (2003)

                            BAD SANTA 
                (a film review by Mark R. Leeper) 

     CAPSULE: Billy Bob Thornton plays a department store 
     Santa who behaves abysmally anti-socially on and off 
     the job.  In the end it all comes to good as you 
     might expect for a Christmas comedy, but the viewer 
     goes through a lot of dirt and ugliness before 
     getting to the white Christmas.  This film is not 
     my cup of wassail.  Rating: 5 (0 to 10), high +0 
     (-4 to +4) 

What would happen if a store Santa were not the kind of person 
that you would want around children?  Suppose instead he was a 
totally selfish, degenerate alcoholic who had the wrong body build 
for Santa, was obviously drunk on duty, refused to wear the Santa 
beard correctly, hated children, and could not talk to his little 
visitors without swearing like a sailor?  Who knows?  It is 
impossible to tell exactly which of the thirty-seven great reasons 
to fire him would be the one used.  Would he be canned in the 
first five minutes or only in the first half-hour?  It is the 
conceit of the contrived film BAD SANTA that this totally wasted 
human can be hired year after year by different unsuspecting 
department stores, based on falsified resumes, and somehow each 
lets him stay for thirty days. 

Every year thief and lush Willie T. Soke (Billy Bob Thornton) and 
his fed-up dwarf partner Marcus (Tony Cox) work for some 
department store their thirty days as an un-jolly Santa and his 
elf.  Then they rob the safe on Christmas Eve.  Willie is not the 
usual Santa Claus.  He has a constant five-day growth of beard, 
always seems to have a bottle in his pocket, and is playing sex 
games in the dressing rooms with overweight customers.  Willie 
does everything he possibly could to get fired and because the 
store manager is trying to be nice and at the same time 
politically correct, Soke gets to hold onto his job and maintain 
short but mutually-destructive relationships with children who 
come for their annual visit with Santa.  That is the background of 
the story.  In the main plot Santa forms a lamprey-like 
relationship with a snot-nosed Pugsley of a child when he 
discovers that the boy effectively lives alone in a fancy house. 
The boy should be tended by his grandmother (an uncredited Cloris 
Leachman) but she has gone senile and that leaves the boy pretty 
much alone.  He is the mark for the local bullies and Santa 
decides there is nobody to stop him from flopping in this nice 
house, eating the food, and borrowing the family car.  He even 
brings his new girl friend Sue (Lauren Graham), a woman whose 
Santa fetish is the only explanation for her attraction to Willie. 
(One loose end, by the way, is how the house is being cared for 
and how the groceries seem to appear in the kitchen.  It does not 
appear to be the kid or his grandmother who is doing the work.) 
The story goes back and forth between endless repetitions of 
incongruous anti-social Santa behavior and Santa's exploitation of 
his new little friend as Marcus tries to do what will be necessary 
for the projected heist. 

In addition to the question of who is taking care of "the kid" (we 
not told his name until almost the end), there are other questions 
the script leaves unanswered.  If Willie as Santa is such a 
liability to Marcus's heists--and he is--why does Marcus want to 
have such a non-productive partner in that role?  There is nothing 
that Willie is contributing as Santa that any drunk Marcus could 
pick up could not be doing better.  Early in the film Marcus does 
his part of the heist in costume.  It makes no sense that he does 
not at least take the head off the costume since it, like Willie, 
is just holding him back. 

This is a Christmas film like few that have ever been made, and it 
certainly gets points for originality, but it is mean-spirited, 
repetitious, and not very funny.  The script is sloppy and needed 
work to tie up many loose ends.  One critic said that this film is 
replacing A CHRISTMAS STORY as his annual Christmas day watch. 
Mine was, and remains, THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS.  That 
film's position is safe.  I give BAD SANTA a 5 on the 0 to 10 
scale and a high 0 on the -4 to +4 scale. 

                                        Mark R. Leeper 
                                        [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
                                        Copyright 2003 Mark R. Leeper

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X-RAMR-ID: 36403
X-Language: en
X-RT-ReviewID: 1222986
X-RT-TitleID: 1127300
X-RT-AuthorID: 1309
X-RT-RatingText: 5/10