By Preston Wilder
This week’s reviews are Rogue One and Bad Santa 2 but the final score is more like Rogue Two, Bad Santa 1, the Star Wars spin-off edging the belated sequel to the 2003 anti-Christmas classic. To be honest, I didn’t see it coming. I’ve never been a Star Wars fan, whereas I consider Bad Santa one of the funniest American comedies of the 21st century. Alas, this sequel makes every mistake that a Bad Santa sequel could make – above all, in junking the delicate balance that made the original so special.
That balance is hard to define, which is as it should be; near-perfection isn’t meant to be easy. The script to Bad Santa was polished (uncredited) by the Coen brothers – yet it didn’t feel polished but creatively scrappy, a heady mix that leaned on a gimmick (the lewd, bad-tempered antidote to Christmassy sweetness-and-light) without seeming one-note. At its centre was Willie Soke (Billy Bob Thornton), the misanthropic crook who posed as Santa so he could rob department stores – but Willie was a worst among equals, surrounded by fellow cynics; even the 10-year-old kid (Brett Kelly) whose role was to melt Bad Santa’s heart was too weird for saccharine sentiment, a wide-eyed space alien seemingly made out of dough. Bad Santa was also fundamentally sad and even serious, a film about a man who’d lost faith in the world. “Not much of a talker, are you?” asked the girl, played by Lauren Graham – and Willie sighed and muttered: “No, not really…”
Ms. Graham isn’t in the sequel – but Thornton is, and so is Kelly, and so is Tony Cox as Marcus, the foul-mouthed midget (sorry, ‘little person’) who inveigles Willie into yet another Christmas heist. The major addition is Kathy Bates as Willie’s white-trash mother – and this is where the balance starts to topple, because Bates’ role is analogous to Fat Bastard’s in the Austin Powers movies. She belches, goes to the toilet with the door open, she’s disgusting, she has no filter; she’s a cartoon, her only saving grace being that she’s physically failing (what she calls “a touch of the Parkinsons”). Bates is a sign of the film’s misshapen thinking, turned into an out-and-out grotesque in the name of goosing the audience.
Everyone’s a cartoon here, from the prissy security nerd (“nomenclature”) to the prim do-gooder giving way to her inner sex maniac. Willie, too, might be a cartoon – but not when he’s played by Thornton, whose slow drawl and weary delivery are Bad Santa 2’s biggest asset. He’s at his best when reacting to life’s annoyances with half-submerged rage; he can’t save the more stupid jokes – but he’s great when quietly snarling at the latest bit of oppressive officiousness (Bartender: “You can’t smoke here, sir”; Willie: “So call the f***in’ law”), or just contemplating his surroundings with the venomous distaste of a lifelong unbeliever in happy endings, let alone Christmas. Willie is epically surly, tending to explode as a matter of course (on being told to hurry up: “You see me walking backwards, asshole?”). He’s also fearless, and even – in his miserable way – a force of Nature. Think he’ll be cowed when thrown in a prison cell with a scary tattooed wannabe-rapist? Think again.
Billy Bob deserves better material – though in fact it’s not terrible. Even with the balance askew, even with that vital edge of melancholy lost, even with the emphasis on shock and disgust, even with the overall dynamic reduced to ‘OMG this Santa is so Bad watch him nail the fat girl and say f*** for the zillionth time’ – even with all that, the film is funny, or at least its highlights are funnier than Office Christmas Party (the other inappropriately raunchy Christmas comedy at the multiplex). The po-faced, X-rated banter pays some dividends; watching Willie explain to Marcus why being nicknamed ‘Tripod’ isn’t really such a big deal if you’re a midget is certainly among the funnier things I’ve seen this year.
You might say the sequel goes too far in both directions – too far into crudeness, then too far into sentimentality, like a drunk who ends up losing his balance and falling over – and you’d have a point; yet the mix still works, when the film bothers to mix it. The moment when Willie is stopped in his tracks by the weird kid angelically singing ‘Silent Night’ hit me harder than the entire Star Wars franchise – something about the silent devastation on Thornton’s face, the look of a man suddenly confronted with a truth he’s been denying all his life. Bad Santa 2 isn’t worthless – yet it’s still depressing, cutting down a rich original to the vogue for gross-out humour. It’s a sequel that steals a template, sucks out its essence, and replaces it with the cheapest of laughs. Like that dyslexic devil-worshipper, it’s sold its soul to Santa.
DIRECTED BY Mark Waters
STARRING Billy Bob Thornton, Tony Cox, Kathy Bates
US 2016 92 mins
