"Bad Santa"
Review: "Bad Santa"
Posted on December 25th, 2003 by The Crystal Lich
You don’t have to be a drunken department store Santa to see how blurry this
storyline is, but it couldn’t hurt.
Willie (Billy Bob Thornton) isn’t really a drunken department store Santa
bent on self-destruction. He’s actually a safecracker who uses the Santa
routine to gain access to the stores he robs, but that doesn’t make him any
less bent on self-destruction. Along with his partner Marcus (Tony Cox) who
tags along as Santa’s elf, the pair hooks up each Christmas season in a different
location to pull their scam. This year, things are a little different; events
are in motion that may end the annual Yule heist permanently, the first being
a kid (Brent Kelly) who inexplicably believes Willie to be the real Santa.
Dark comedy isn’t a new idea in cinema, but it’s one of the hardest to put
across and rarely comes together successfully. Last year’s “Death to Smoochy”
was an over-the-top near miss, while “Evolution” was an over-the-top mess.
The problem is this: if someone has to die horribly for entertainment’s sake,
victims should either deserve what happens to them or see it coming (“Smoochy”
got this right), but rage and violence wasted on the undeserving falls very
flat (like the hundreds of soldiers crushed to death in “Evolution.”) Dark
comedy has to straddle a fine line between cruelty and comedy to work, so
unless you’re blessed with the collective talents of Monty Python, there’s
a lot that can go wrong.
Then there are films like “Very Bad Things,” where each character proves
so dark and unworthy in the microcosm of the movie’s reality that no one
really cares what happens to the characters, let alone about the film itself.
That said, “Bad Santa” isn’t as tastelessly heartless or unredeeming as “Very
Bad Things,” but having to endure Thornton’s Willie slowly killing himself
with rage and alcohol wasn’t as amusing it might have read in the script
if only because, to Thornton’s credit, he looked so convincing doing it.
Sometimes it works (again, usually when someone deserves Willie’s wrath)
and sometimes it doesn’t, and even the antics of John Ritter (his last film
role) and Bernie Mac can only briefly salvage the story of one man’s quest
to drink himself to death or die trying.
The ultimate resolution to the entire production reeks of audience testing,
but with the conclusion that made it into the final cut, one can only imagine
how much worse one or more of the others must have been. There is also the
possibility that the epilogue ending was tacked on after the actual ending
(especially since Thornton himself is conspicuously missing from it), but
whoever was responsible for the conclusion did manage to salvage what little
meaning the film retained in just a couple of minutes prior to the credits.
Whether or not those few precious moments are worth enduring the rest of
the film isn’t something that needs any more words wasted on it; unless you
just need to see others suffer to make you feel better about yourself, view
at your own risk.
(a one skull recommendation out of four)
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