Bad Santa

Directed by Terry Zwigoff, Bad Santa follows an alcoholic conman (Billy Bob Thornton’s Willie) as he and his partner (Tony Cox’s Marcus) prepare to rob a department store on Christmas Eve – with complications ensuing after Willie finds himself drawn to a bullied boy (Brett Kelly) and a sexy bartender (Lauren Graham’s Sue). Filmmaker Zwigoff, working from a script by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, delivers a slow-moving yet consistently compelling endeavor that admittedly possesses its fair share of big laughs, and yet the movie, for the most part, comes off as a low-key character study of Thornton’s exceedingly broken central protagonist – with the predominantly episodic narrative detailing Willie’s self-destructive exploits and, eventually, his reluctant friendships with Kelly and Graham’s respective figures. And although the picture admittedly does suffer from a somewhat hit-and-miss atmosphere, Bad Santa‘s proliferation of appealing and compelling elements, including an often spellbinding turn from Thornton, ensures that the movie remains fairly captivating for the duration of its appropriately brisk running time – with the end result a comedy that mostly lives up to its reputation as an edgy, unabashedly R-rated Christmas movie.

*** out of ****