Christmas Is Here Again Bad Santa Compliant

For those with ears to hear, 2003's "Bad Santa" was a wicked lilliputian Christmas carol. From idiosyncratic filmmaker Terry Zwigoff ("Ghost World") and writing squad Glenn Ficarra and John Requa ("I Dear Y'all Phillip Morris"), the Billy Bob Thornton heist comedy ignored the usual Ebenezer Scrooge-style stations of the cross to lesson-laden redemption and that journeying's attendant heartwarmth.

Its profane insults and defiant refusal of cheer were a common cold, astringent slap. And while hardly inventing irreverence for the vacation, the film showed up to win every bit though no one told it that hating Christmas wasn't actually a competitive sport.

It'southward probably to be expected, then, that a picture show that often gleefully and brashly critiqued the practice of corporately enforced happiness during the calendar month of December would fall victim to a kind of corporate cruelty itself. Welcome to "Bad Santa ii," another in a long line of Hollywood'south almost cynical trick: the brand-exploiting exercise-over.

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Willie (Thornton) is out of jail. Dumped past his ex ("Bad Santa" co-star Lauren Graham, absent here) and living in an Arizona cabin room designed to break the human spirit, his two constants are alcoholism and Thurman Merman (Brett Kelly). The son figure Willie never successfully shook off, Thurman is now 21 and working in a sandwich shop. But his numerical age and height are all that's changed. Thurman'south devotion to — and endless capacity to annoy — Willie is as cheerfully innocent as ever.

Marcus (Tony Cox), the ruthless elf to Willie's bitter department store Santa, shows up, offer to cutting Willie in on a big job in Chicago. Only upon arrival in Illinois does Willie learn that Marcus's partner is Sunny (Kathy Bates), Willie's equally despicable female parent. The heist involves draining cash from a crooked homeless charity run by the smarmy Regent Hastings (Ryan Hansen, "Veronica Mars"). Hastings'due south wife, Diane (Christina Hendricks), assigns Willie the job of sidewalk, bell-ringing Santa, and back into the ruddy suit he goes, seething all the way.

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A recovering alcoholic who recognizes her ain kind, Diane takes Willie to an AA meeting. Then they take sex in an aisle. And then in a Christmas tree lot. And then anywhere else they can find to do it, ordinarily after he says something disgusting to her about her breasts. There's no real reason for these pit stops of pleasance-free coitus; the film only decides that sex almost a dumpster is inherently funny.

Thurman shows upwardly at the homeless shelter after hopping onto a bus wearing little more Arizona-appropriate shorts, further complicating Willie'due south efforts to pull off one last big job. Not that the curly-mopped naïf could help or hinder much of anything; these characters are bad at their chosen lives of criminal offense, and, more importantly, inevitably drawn toward their own doom. If the heist itself weren't a downward spiral toward failure, there'd be no plot at all.

Director Marking Waters ("Mean Girls") clearly enjoys his bandage and generously gives them space to relax into the familiarity of their characters, every bit if hoping they might be able to make sense of the script. That screenplay, credited to Shauna Cantankerous ("Whip It") and first-timer Johnny Rosenthal, feels tampered with, intruded upon, ham-strung to be more of the same, but less. In fact, it's incommunicable to sentry "Bad Santa 2" without getting the sense that people who knew how to exercise their jobs were studio-noted out of their minds and forced to run a futile obstacle form hampered by budget restrictions, shortened shooting schedules, and general abandon.

Information technology leans in to mean as hard as the starting time film, but to no purpose. Cruel comedy done well, equally on HBO's "Veep" or its cinematic predecessor, "In The Loop," is like an electric jolt that becomes as narratively necessary equally whatsoever activeness-based plot bespeak. Just here the jokes accept on a rote quality, the vituperative insults and exact jabs repeating themselves until it all sounds like an endless loop of dogs barking "Jingle Bells."

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The lone shining light is Brett Kelly. His Thurman isn't merely a figure of whole-hearted goodness for Thornton to bounciness off of; he is greatly odd, a cartel of a graphic symbol that Kelly commits to with such steadfast weirdness that he tin become borderline uncomfortable to watch. When unabridged rest of the movie goes right, he goes left, and his on-screen moments are the funniest and most memorable. But Kelly'due south inspired off-brand strangeness, jarringly comic as it is, is not enough to save "Bad Santa two" from sinking.

Consumer culture'due south distortion of Christmas, an ongoing source of anxiety and unhappiness for so many people, deserves to exist spurned, ridiculed and turned into brutal comic forage. But "Bad Santa 2" ignores its responsibility to that resistance. There is nothing to be gained hither. No new, hilarious examples of how to detest your mother, detest your friends, hate all the people around y'all, hate children, detest that person who gives you desperate pity sex, hate Christmas, hate life.

"Bad Santa two" is the re-gift that stops with yous, the kind that winds up in a landfill. Information technology'due south tedious and lifeless, a waste of precious fourth dimension, and ultimately, an exhausting case of what people should really be talking about when they decide to annoy you with rants almost the State of war on Christmas.

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9. "Silent Night" (2012)

Opening: $nine,779

Cumulative: $fourteen,567

Malcolm McDowell, Jaime Male monarch and Donal Logue star in the flick about a murderous Santa who picks off people 1 by one.

Anchor Bay
viii. "Meliorate Watch Out" (2016)

Opening: $12,569

Cumulative: $xx,369

Olivia DeJonge plays a bodyguard who must protect a 12-twelvemonth-old male child later on a home invasion while his parents are out at a holiday party.

Well Get
7. "Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale" (2010)

Opening: $9,281

Cumulative: $236,347

The film follows a grouping of people living near the Korvatunturi mountain who discover the hush-hush behind Santa Claus.

Oscilloscope Pictures
6. "Anna and the Apocalypse" (2018)

Opening: $52,588
Cumulative: $545,597

In this comedic musical with grossout touches, a teenager and her friends ward off the zombie apocalypse when it comes at Christmas-time.

Orion
5. "Silent Night, Deadly Dark" (1984)

Opening: $1.4 million
Cumulative: $2.5 meg

In the slasher film, a young boy loses his parents and years later becomes a spree killer in a Santa costume.

TriStar
iv. "Blackness Christmas" (2019)

Opening: $4.2 one thousand thousand
Cumulative: $10.4 one thousand thousand

A second remake of a 1974 Canadian motion picture, starring Imogen Poots, Aleyse Shannon, Lily Donoghue and Brittany O'Grady, this slasher film virtually sorority sisters fighting off a stalker takes a stab at feminist themes.

Universal
3. "Blackness Christmas" (2006)

Opening: $3.7 1000000
Cumulative: $16.iii meg

Michelle Trachtenberg, Lacey Chabert and Katie Cassidy star in the slasher film nigh sorority girls getting murdered 1 by one (a remake of a 1974 Canadian film).

MGM
two. "Krampus" (2015)

Opening: $16.iii million
Cumulative: $42.7 1000000

A boy in a dysfunctional family unit turns his dorsum on Christmas -- and accidentally unleashes a demon force as a result.

Universal
ane. "Gremlins" (1984)

Opening: $12.5 million
Cumulative: $148.2 1000000

The flick follows a young boy who breaks rules and unleashes a horde of mischievous monsters.

Warner Bros.