Viking Night: Bad Santa
By Bruce Hall
December 29, 2015
BoxOfficeProphets.com
I hate those. I feel very strongly that if you are old enough to read, and you still need someone to specifically tell you not to drink bleach, then maybe we’d all be better off without you. You’re probably the kind of person who needs to be reminded that Christmas is a time of happiness and cheer, that it is better to give than receive, and that family is important because yadda yadda yadda Christmas ratings Black Friday buy/consume/conform.
I don’t need to hear Jingle Bells ever again. I don’t need to see Rudolph, or Frosty, or the Grinch. I don’t need to be reminded what a wonderful time of year this is. I have two four day weekends in a row. I get a nice little bonus in my paycheck. For the first time all year don’t mind checking the mail. And for a few weeks at the end of every year, we all pretend to be happy, joyous and tolerant. It’s the perfect annual campaign of nationwide cultural disinformation, and I’m happy with it the way it is.
The last thing I need is Lifetime or Disney shoving a spoonful of candy coated Christmas pabulum down my throat on top of it. This is why I prefer dark, irreverent, even impious fare when it comes to Christmas movies. I’m talking the kind of material that reminds us that violence, car chases and kinky hot tub sex can also be part of the holidays. That’s not to say that crime pays. Hans Gruber learned that lesson right before he face planted into Nakatomi plaza. Mel Gibson taught us much about selfless personal sacrifice in Lethal Weapon. And who can forget the majesty of family fellowship embodied by Randy Quaid in Christmas Vacation?
What I’m saying is that I like my Christmas movies a little raw. Chestnuts roasting and little red-nosed reindeer are fine for some people. But there’s enough cheer in the air already. All that’s necessary is to combine it into the things we already love best about movies. Namely, violence, car chases and kinky hot tub sex. That’s why a movie like Bad Santa always intrigues me. It takes something good about the holidays and twists a lot of ugliness into it. Not unlike a candy cane, it’s two weird things existing together in the form of something that would not in any way feel acceptable at any other time of year.
Bad Santa is very much in that category, as it is the story of the thoroughly revolting Willie Stokes (Billy Bob Thornton), a career drunkard who moonlights as a department store Santa during the holidays. It’s apparently possible to make a living this way, unless you’re a stinking drunk with a broken moral compass and no immediately specific reason to be alive. Willie manages to stretch himself through every year this way, much to the irritation of his partner, Marcus (Tony Cox). By day, they pose as a dime store Santa (Willie) traveling with a merry dwarf (Marcus), spreading Christmas cheer, unfiltered profanity and possibly gonorrhea through the malls of America’s heartland.
At night, they rob the joints blind. Like I said, it’s apparently possible to make a living this way.
Unfortunately for Willie and Marcus, their once storied and lucrative partnership is on the brink of collapse. Over the years, Willie’s drinking has progressed to the point where he can’t be relied on to not swear at children or pee his Santa suit, and it’s beginning to draw the wrong kind of attention. This year, they’re working a mall in Phoenix, and the manager (John Ritter) is suspicious of them from the start. The head of security (Bernie Mac) is actually intrigued by them, since his time on the job is largely spent looking to make a buck on the side. Marcus is able to keep the heat off, but Willie’s rock star antics get harder to conceal every day.
The funny/tragic thing about Bad santa is that Willie really is a complete dirtbag. I’m not sure where it went wrong for him, but he’s a perpetually drunk, foul-mouthed, ultra acerbic jerkface who truly does not give a rat’s ass about anything on God’s earth aside from his next drink. Even better, he lacks the ability to temper himself in front of children, and shows no remorse whatsoever about his family-shattering public shenanigans. In fact, Thornton inhabits the role so thoroughly, it’s no wonder he received so much acclaim for it. Of course, it doesn’t help when your story’s protagonist is only slightly more adorable than Lee Harvey Oswald.
Luckily, Willie is provided a shot at redemption by a promiscuous bartender (Lauren Graham) named Sue, who happens to have a fetish for guys in Santa suits. Sue is basically the “hooker with a heart of gold” archetype here, only she’s a barkeep who gets hammered and bangs her patrons. But she does fulfill her role as Willie’s moral safety net and primary positive influence, which is the only reason she’s there. And here’s a fun tip: Watch an episode of Gilmore Girls right after Bad Santa, and pretend Graham is secretly playing the same character. Doing it is a lot more fun than not doing it, I can assure you.
More important, Willie eventually makes the acquaintance of an unfortunate young boy named Thurman (Brett Kelly). Thurman is the fat, smelly kid that all the other boys pick on - but there’s a preternatural calm about him that allows him to weather it with perfect serenity. He looks like an oversized Russian tea doll with a dorky wardrobe and a head of golden locks that would make Ian Ziering weep with joy. He buys into Willie’s role as Santa, and takes the older man’s abuse with the same good natured tranquility as when the class bully gives him an atomic wedgie. It’s actually a little creepy, as those soulless, unblinking blue eyes of his remind me more of a Twilight Zone episode than of an impressionable lad in need of a role model.
But Kelly too fulfills his role, and Willie allows himself to be taken under the wing of both the bar babe and the pint-sized homunculus. The only question is whether it’ll help him avoid the disaster we all know is coming in the last act. And it does in fact, seem in question, because the tone of Bad Santa is one of relentlessly dark humor almost up to the end. Watching Willie flail and curse his way through one scene after another is undeniably entertaining, but you keep imagining yourself in the same position, NOT screwing things up and getting to have naughty Santa sex with late '90s Lauren Graham.
This is why, when the film finally appears to end, it’s sad, but you feel a sense of closure. It’s not a pleasant sense of closure but it feels just and right and in many ways, merciful. Then the film ends again, and in a way that feels very much like focus audiences did not respond well to the original ending. I’m not sure whether or not this is true, but I can say that the tone of the ending is so at odds with the rest of the movie I would stop just short of calling it “jarring." It’s not quite as jarring as one of the major characters abruptly disappearing from the story, seemingly before his arc is complete. That’s really the kind of closure I appreciate more out of a movie, but none of it is enough for me to say that Bad Santa is a Bad Movie.
No, it’s a good watch, and it’s a lot of fun in the way it is to watch a completely fictional character destroy their life. Were this a drama instead of a comedy, it might be harder to watch - although it’s likely that Daniel Day-Lewis would play Santa, and that’s something I’d pay real money to see. As it is, Bad Santa has everything YOU want out of a Christmas movie - eventually there is warmth, cheer and redemption for the fallen. But more important, it’s got everything I want, which is that AND violence, car chases and kinky hot tub sex. It’s the best of both worlds, and among the best of all holiday classics. And without question, it features the best drunken, trash talking Santa ever put to film.
Happy @%#* Holidays, everyone!