Wonderful character development!

Highly Overrated But Still Good

As Good As It Gets

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

This bad santa performance is nothing short of amazing. The jokes are very adult oriented and very well placed without sounding juvenile. A Christmas classic to see with your friends and adult family, but spare the kids. They won't get it anyway...

It starts slow. Everything the movie seems to be about is incorporated very quickly and nothing new happens for a bit of a while and the comedy isn't where it should be during that time. Then, it picks up.This is a cold, verbally and sexually explicit dark comedy that is probably a little bit too cynical in tone, but that holds itself up just about well enough all in all.There's certainly a sense of lingering and repetition, with the constant redundant swearing, scenes that are practically built off facile swearing dialog lines, but if one persists enough there's a pretty fun plot at the center of it, a sort of anti-Christmas Christmas magic about it with the kid and the relationship he builds with 'Santa', pretty funny secondary characters like the late Ritter (major stuckup), the late Bernie Mac or Naidu's hilariously random and unnecessary cameo scene.There's even something of a moral at the end. It's fun, coherent but lacks a bit of content even for a comedy running at 1hr30min.6.5/10.

Terry Zwigoff's Bad Santa is as delightfully nasty as holiday comedies get, a hedonistic gut punch of dirty deeds and amoral lowlifes. Billy Bob Thornton is the lowest of them all as Willie, an alcoholic dirtbag criminal con man who poses as a mall santa every year just so he and his 'elf' partner in crime Marcus (everyone's favorite black midget, twitchy Tony Cox) can rob the department stores blind after hours. Willie is truly a glorious example of deplorable human behaviour. He's profane, crass and verbally nasty in almost every scene of the film, engaging in conduct so cringe worthy and sleazy that the laughs which come hard and fast are often at the expense of our consciences. Thornton is pitch perfect for the role, and not to sound mean but there's just something inherently sleazy about his demeanor that lends itself perfectly to playing pricks. Whether he's swearing at kids, banging a hooker in his santa suit or drinking himself into a holiday coma on an hourly basis, he's endless fun. Life throws him a curveball in the form of two fellow lost souls. Spunky bartender Lauren Graham, pissing on her goody Gilmore Girls image as a kinky chick with daddy issues as far as the eye can see and a thing for doing it with Willie while he's in the Santa Suit. He also meets a lonely, bullied kid with some kind of mental disposition that reminded me of Ralph from The Simpsons (Vancouver's own Brett Kelly). They show him that you can still be a marginally OK guy while doing nasty stuff, and you don't have to engage in appalling R rated antics alone. That's about all you'll get in the way of a 'message' from this one lol, it's just not that type of flick. Kudos to it for sticking to its boozy, stripper tassel guns and not deviating into sentimental mush. Throw in Bernie Mac as a preening mall detective and the late John Ritter as the moronic mall manager, and you've got a feel-bad holiday gem that's always worth a watch. Let's hope the upcoming sequel recaptures the magic.

This is a really offensive ignorant film that should appeal to mindless corrupted individuals. Why good actors would appear in a film that clearly abuses children by exposing them to bad language, bad motives, bad behavior of the worst sort and have children in the film is anyone's guess? I am convinced all the writers were in their early teens, 14-15 year old boys who think of nothing but sex and every way to demean human kind. It takes a really sick mind, Willie, is a good example, to come up with this mess and think it's entertaining and worth the charge of admission. I would only recommend this film as a case example of what you should not try to pass off on an unsuspecting public as a Christmas film. Sick.