(The Badder Santa version, 2003) While unlike most Americans I still prefer baseball over football, use ketchup more often than salsa, and have watched It's a Wonderful Life more often than A Christmas Story (though Polar Express and The Nightmare Before Christmas deserve to be new classics), this year for a holiday film I've opted for a tale of misbehaving.

This is a stupid, f**ing movie - a waste of my f**ing time as was seeing the incredibly asinine Elf last year. I watched it because some of my stupid, f**ing friends recommended it to me, so maybe you'll like it more than I did. If you do, you'll probably love What About Bob? and Death to Smoochy.

Santa and his elf - Willie Stoke (Billy Bob Thornton), an expert safecracker, and Marcus (Tony Cox), a black dwarf with plenty of initiative and discipline for the two of them - have teamed up (though their relationship mostly involves trading insults) for each of the previous seven Christmas season in seven different states, performing their roles at a mall department store before breaking into the main safe.

Santa has a lousy attitude (when a mother and her child approach him on his lunch break, he screams at them), comes to work drunk, pisses himself, seasons his language with an ecumenical marriage of profanity and obscenities, and enjoys banging big women in the a**.

In Phoenix, Arizona, the pair get together for what will be their final gig. When the store manager attempts to fire them, they accuse him of being prejudiced against black midget little people. Willie gets involved with Sue (Lauren Graham), a barmaid who has a thing for doing Santa because Christmas was forbidden in her Jewish upbringing, and "Roger" Thurman Merman (Brett Kelly), an eight-year-old, socially inept, curly-headed fat kid who lives with his grandmother because (he's been told) his father's exploring mountains (in prison for embezzlement) and his mother: "Lives in God's house with Jesus and Mary and the Ghost and the long-eared donkey and Joseph and the talking walnut."

Willie robs Roger's father's house safe, takes the car, and after abandoning his motel room moves in. When a neighbor comes over to coordinate sidewalk decorations, "Uncle" Willie says they don't celebrate Christmas: "We're Muslims." Unfazed by Willie's behavior, Roger asks Santa about his elves (they live with Mrs Santa but he gets them on the weekends), the reindeer (How do they sleep with all the noise and it's being daylight all the time at the North Pole?), Mrs Santa and Mrs Santa's sister (Sue), etc., and shares the stories and candies from his Advent calendar.

A gang of skateboarders harasses and picks on Roger, calling him a retarded moron and giving him a wicked wedgy. Willie lectures Roger on how the world ain't fair, how he needs to learn to stand up for himself and kick his tormenters in the balls; then he and Marcus attempt to teach the kid how to defend himself with painful results.

Elsewhere the store dick, Gin (Bernie Mac), gets wise to their scheme and demands to be made a 50% partner in exchange for his letting them clean out the safe. Disgusted with himself (Marcus tells him, "You need many years of therapy") he confesses to the kid, "I'm the living fucking proof there's no Santa," and attempts suicide with carbon monoxide. The conclusion is violent for a comedy and unrealistic, but so what. So's Santa Claus.

Click here for links to places to buy or rent this movie in video and/or DVD format, or to buy the soundtrack, posters, books, even used videos, games, electronics and lots of other stuff. I suggest you shop at least two of these places before buying anything. Prices seem to vary continuously. For more information on this film, click on this link to The Internet Movie Database. Type in the name of the movie in the search box and press enter. You will be able to find background information on the film, the actors, and links to much more information.

Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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