Starring: Billy Bob Thornton, Bernie Mac, Lauren Graham (I), John Ritter

6 out of 10 stars

Zooming beyond dark comedy into some kind of misanthropic hellhole, Bad Santa is a movie seemingly predicated on finding out how many times you can say "fuck" to ten year old kid. It's utterly profane, entirely sacrilegious and, at times, absolutely fawking brilliant. Sadly, at times it's also rather pedestrian, trampling the icon of Santa with a hateful abandon and bizarre glee that seems too premeditated to be truly genius. If you hold Father Christmas in any kind of godlike respect (along the lines of that other fellow the Christian holiday season is geared to idolize), you will blanch at this movie, if not faint outright. Of course, that seems to be what you're supposed to do, as Bad Santa is igniting a rather perfunctory culture war, thanks primarily to Matt Drudge and a handful of B-rate pundits, who seem shocked – shocked! – that Santa's getting a bad rap.

Bad Santa thoroughly and easily inhabits the same landscape as Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World, where only the losers have true character, the suburban lifestyle is for inane bozos, comely girls lust after middle-aged has-beens (or never-weres) and consumerism is met with an uplifted middle finger. It's a bleak and desolate place, but not without its merits and occasional oasis, and Bad Santa shares that feeling that Ghost World had, where individual scenes, people and lines were funny, but the overall feeling was one of a very mordant, not quite so funny world. Ghost World got away with that nihilism (most of the time) because of its incredibly solid cast, from superb leads Thora Birch and Scarlett Johannson all the way to lunky Brad Renfro, with the incredible Steve Buscemi lighting up the center. What Bad Santa could have used is a more well-rounded cast to leaven its callous, scabrous wit, a number of assorted stars each shining in its galaxy.

What Bad Santa does have, however, is a supernova in the form of Billy Bob Thornton, giving one of the best comic performances – heck, best performances period – of the year. While it's hard to tell if he's actually playing a character or just riffing on the bilious lines he's given (courtesy of Glenn Ficarra and John Requa), Thornton's Willie T. Stokes is a tour de force. Willie is almost literally the pond scum of humanity, a smoking, drinking, lazy, horny, profane, misanthropic, suicidal, disgusting, pathetic excuse for a human being. In repose he's off-putting ("Every single fucking thing about you is ugly," he's succinctly informed), but what hurls him over the top is how he makes his living – every year, Willie plays Santa in a scam concocted by his midget partner Marcus (Tony Cox) to scam department stores out of their money. Taking advantage of corporate cost-cutting, they underbid existing Santas to get the holiday gig, selling themselves as a combo Santa-and-Elf at bargain basement prices. Tolerating the small children, they then bilk their employer out of all their Christmas wealth, disappearing from sight….until they pop up again next year in a different locale.

The latest setting for their yuletide scheming is Arizona, where the rarely sober Willie is the headliner at the "Christmas Corral," horrifying the children as well as the Mall Manager (the late John Ritter, in a perfectly pitched performance), who's too afraid of political correctness to fire either surly Willie or the African-American, diminutive Marcus. Of all the kids who come to visit, though, there's one not entirely put off by Santa's crude antics, and it's this tubby young boy who rescues Willie from a strangely homophobic mugger. Never asking his name, Willie just calls the curly-haired tyke "The Kid" and takes something resembling a shine to him. Actually, he takes a shine to The Kid's suburban McMansion, which is populated only by the youngster and his addled grandmother (Cloris Leachman, wasted entirely). Willie soon sets himself up in residence, brings his hotter-than-hot girlfriend (Lauren Graham) over for some play time and consistently berates The Kid… until that tiny scratch of humanity left in him starts to fester and take him over like an infection. He teaches The Kid how to defend himself against skateboarding bullies (after punching out the adolescent leader), starts looking out for him, and even decides that getting him a Christmas present might not be a bad idea.

The uplifting trajectory of Bad Santa is what keeps it from being a truly bleak comedy, despite Zwigoff's attempt to bloody up the finale (don't ask) and make The Kid a verbal punching bag for Willie's insults. As The Kid, Brett Kelly has a chubby face that just misses being cherubic and a Teflon exterior that would put Cameron Diaz's sunny deflections of crudity to shame. Willie piles on the insults, the profanity, the disgusting mannerisms, and it all slides off The Kid (his real name is one of the movie's truly sad – and hilarious – jokes) like water – or a much more disgusting fluid – off a duck. Thornton, for his part, shows no remorse in his treatment of Kelly, and it comes off as an odd respect that Thornton doesn't show for any of the other actors in the movie – not Cox (who's a one-note elf if there ever was one) nor Bernie Mac, who as the head of mall security, painfully underplays his role, showing not even a glimmer of the spark he had in his brief Ocean's Eleven scenes. Thornton's performance grows incredibly brilliant and hilarious as he takes Willie farther down into the abyss of self-destruction and self-disgust; sadly, you can feel the rest of the movie following a little too quickly and eagerly after him.

Despite Thornton's uncompromising and audacious performance, Bad Santa ultimately becomes too much too fast, as Zwigoff upsets the balance of the plot by piling on the absurdities, inanities and crudities to the nth degree, with Willie pissing his pants, scratching his ass and taking a certain, um, posterior advantage of his female conquests, among other niceties. The worst victim of Zwigoff's excesses is the sunny Graham, who's made for half her screen time to bounce up and down on Thornton while incanting "Fuck me Santa, fuck me Santa, fuck me Santa." (One shudders to think of the auditions for this role.) When she first starts bouncing, it's one of those flashpoint moments that seems calculatedly designed to get you to walk out of the theater, a confrontational "Screw you" (sorry, I've already used up my "fuck" quotient in this review) to the Christmas spirit. It's not so much as if your jaw drops as it is the feeling you get it's being pulled down. Even with gross-out comedies, sometimes less is more. After a while, no matter how much bigger that pile of crap gets, it still smells exactly the same.