[5.8/10] In her *Loose Canon* series, Lindsay Ellis posits that the overarching theme for modern depictions of Santa Claus is “subversion.” Santa is a traditional, wholesome figure. We live in fractured, cynical times. So between the two, there’s a modern impulse to enjoy the transgressiveness of taking something pure like the popular image of Old Saint Nick and throw him into all sorts of tawdry guises for the sake of novelty.

I’m not knocking it. I grew up in that era, where *South Park* rose to fame on the back of Santa throwing down with Jesus, and Bart Simpson daydreamed about robbing Kris Kringle with a tommy gun. There’s plenty of fun to be had from slaughtering sacred cows through the lens of comedy.

But that’s the only move *Bad Santa* has in its bag of tricks. Billy Bob Thornton is, true to the title, a bad mall Santa. He spends most of the movie dressed in the famous red and white duds. But he drinks! He smokes! He curses! He steals! He vomits! He pisses himself! He pervs on women at the mall! He accuses his boss of maligning his junk! He sleeps with a Jewish bartender with a peculiar Kris Kringle complex! He schtups plus-sized prostitutes in department store changing rooms! He squats in the home of a dementia-ridden grandmother! He’s rude to children! You can practically hear the trailer voiceover saying, “You may think Santa is just a friendly old sprite, but there’s no boundary *this* Santa won’t cross, folks!”

And that’s it, really. If you’ve seen the joke for the first five minutes, you’ve seen it for the whole movie. There’s no sense of build or escalation or variation. There’s simply “Willie the Bad Santa”, engaging in the same, undifferentiated debauchery for ninety minutes or so. If you don’t find the idea of a dissolute Santa actor engaging in a children’s garden of depravity funny, *Bad Santa* has nothing for. And even if you do, the movie runs the joke into the ground in the first fifteen minutes.

That goes for the non-Santa characters too. There’s little in the way of actual jokes in this movie. Every once in a while, you get the rare laugh-worthy line. Marcus, the elf actor and Willlie’s partner in crime, quips to his counterpart, “You need many years of therapy,” and the dry, scoffing delivery brings the yuks. The happy-go-lucky responses from Thurman, Willie’s accidental young ward, in response to the faux-Santa’s agitated grouchery is worth a chuckle. And the physical comedy of Willie riding, half collapsed, up the escalator until he’s haphazardly deposited onto the showroom floor has some off-kilter charm.

For the most part, though, the film is content to show something raunchy or ribald, declare that it suffices for humor, and call it a day. Marcus spews a waterfall of profanity. Bernie Mac pours laxative powder and insults a little person. Willie’s sort of girlfriend, Sue, yells “fuck me, Santa” while they hump in his car. A random bar patron calls him the f-slur out of nowhere and tries to sodomize him.

That’s all *Bad Santa* has to offer -- the sort of schoolyard humor that relies on the idea that dirty words and scatalogical scenarios are intrinsically funny enough on their own, without the need to add any, you know, actual humor or joke construction beyond the same, repetitive “Look at the gross/sexual/lewd thing one of characters did” routine. For a theoretical comedy movie, *Bad Santa* is all but devoid of laughs.

A good part of that falls on Thornton’s shoulders, albeit not in the way you’d expect.

He is...really convincing as a drunken degenerate, running on fumes, and practically wallowing in his own crapulence. On the one hand, I kind of think he deserves an Oscar nomination for the performance. When he stares at himself in the mirror with a look of exhaustion and self-loathing, when he grouses or snaps at everyone with the misfortune to interact with him, when he hits rock bottom and collapses in an ugly heap,it never feels like a performance or a put on. If anything, it’s too real.

Willie is a miserable bastard, one whose anger and listing toward self-destruction plays as genuine and ghastly, the point that you sometimes want to recoil from it. This Coen Bros. produced *Bad Santa*, and you can easily imagine jettisoning the sophomoric nonsense of this movie and transposing Willie into one of their more straight-laced, blackly comic pictures without missing a beat. If anything, Thornton’s turn presages Mickey Rourke’s performance in *The Wrestler* just a few years later. He deserves credit for that.

But he also deserves blame because, by god, Thornton didn’t understand the assignment. *Bad Santa* isn’t just intended as a comedy; it’s an over-the-top, ridiculous comedy, one centered on Willie’s outlandish behavior. So while this off-beat Santa’s insults and alcoholism and overall combativeness are supposed to be humorous; instead his antics come off authentic enough to real life burnouts that the results are either repugnant or downright sad. There isn’t anything terribly funny about Willie Soke, no matter what costume you put him in.

The lone saving grace of the film is Willie’s relationship with Thurman. Thurman himself is a bright spot in the film, this dopey but pure-of-heart little boy who constantly gets the short end of the stick, but doesn’t let it dampen his spirits. Young Brett Kelly plays the character with a flat affect and an oblivious temperament, but somehow that just makes his matter-of-fact chipperness and sincerity that much more endearing.

The turn in the narrative is that, as depraved as Willie might be, as much as he’s initially just using Thurman for a place to lie low, eventually he takes a genuine shine to the boy. When he’s plainly touched by Thurman going to the trouble of carving him a gift, it shows an unexpected streak of humanity. When he’s bowled over by Thurman admitting he knows Willie’s not Santa Claus but thought he might still bring him a present since they’re friends, it’s unexpectedly poignant. When he sees Thurman with a black eye and goes to beat up the pre-teen bullies who hassled the poor kid, it’s absurd but strangely wholesome.

It’s also severely underbaked. We don’t get much in the way of Willie forging any kind of relationship with this kid. The film spends much more time on his bad santa escapades than it does on his softening to Thurman. The change-of-heart comes suddenly and late, to the point that it feels tacked on. To that end, even though the movie means to paint Marcus as the bad guy, turning him into a murderous wretch with Willie ragging on him for his materialism, Marcus spends ninety percent of the movie trying to keep things running while dealing with Willie’s terrible unreliable crap, so the flip seems out of nowhere.

Despite all that, Willie’s move toward redemption is the only thing that elevates the movie. Undercooked or not, the fact that an asshole like Willie can have his heart moved by a weird but innocent little kid like Thurman is unassuming in its sweetness. Even a right bastard, one who never had a good fatherly role model himself, is capable of a bit of good, when presented with the right opportunity, and a chance to be a little better than he was the year before.

That is the ultimate irony of *Bad Santa*. The power of the film is supposed to come from it subverting the image of the preternaturally kind and decent Ol’ Saint Nick. But in the end, its only real power comes when it subverts the subversion, when it’s the drunk and debauched Kris Kringle who discovers a touch of decency and compassion, one pink stuffed elephant at a time.