Synopsis: Hollywood favorites Billy Bob Thornton (The Alamo), Bernie Mac (Mr. 3000) and John Ritter (TV’s 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter) star in the year’s most talked-about comedy hit, Bad Santa. You’d better watch out – Santa Claus Willie T. Stokes (Thornton) is coming to town and he doesn’t care if you’ve been naughty or nice. Willie’s favorite holiday tradition is to fill his sacks with loot lifted from shopping malls across the country. But this year his plot gets derailed by a wisecracking store detective (Mac), a sexy bartender (Lauren Graham – TV’s Gilmore Girls) and a kid who’s convinced Willie is the real Santa Claus.
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Bad Santa 8.5

On paper, this movie would not seem like a funny film at all: it’s crude, filthy and unabashedly mean. But, with the help of the perfect cast (featuring Billy Bob Thornton in the role he was born to play!), it has been honed into a naughty little number that actually has a bit of heart – enough for redemption, but not enough to be saccharine.

And thank goodness for that, because it’s not the kind of movie that could afford to get sickly sweet – it’s clearly a Christmas movie for cynics, and too much sweetness would certainly have spoiled the fun. After all, how gushing would anyone want the story of an alcoholic thief (who stakes shopping malls for Christmas plunder!) to be? It’s meant to be dark and twisted – courtesy of executive producers Joel and Ethan Coen.

So, if ever you get sick of the fairytale stories and dreamy Christmas fantasies, give ‘Bad Santa’ a try. If you don’t burst a gut laughing at the bile being thrown everywhere, it will at the very least put a smile on that Grinch face of yours 😛