Adam and I got sloshed last night and watched Bad Santa 2. It was horrible.
After looking back through the archives, it seems I have not written a blog post about Bad Santa. This is probably because we covered it on one of our Christmas episodes. To varying degrees, Adam and I were on the same page about that one. It had some charm. It was overall an enjoyable film that deserved to exist.
Bad Santa 2 is not enjoyable, and does not deserve to exist. Why they dragged poor Kathy Bates into this is beyond me. Then again, a lot of choices in this film are beyond me.
The unfortunate child from the first film, who I now know is called Thurman Merman, was dopey the first time, but he wasn’t completely stupid. He was just a kid. I had no trouble believing a kid could be as thick and awkward as he seemed to be. I never thought he was defined by a characteristic of being completely, unsalvageably stupid. But here he is and that’s what they’ve made of him.
Tony Cox returns as Marcus, and all the bad blood that once drove him to mean to murder Billy Bob Thornton’s Willie seems to have left him. Willie is inexplicably willing to work with Marcus again. His love interest from the first movie is absent. He seems to be every bit the hopeless piece of trash he was in the first film, as if no lesson was learned, as if no character growth had occurred by the end of the original movie.
At least Thornton has the decency in Bad Santa 2 to appear as miserable as the audience to be apart of it.
From what I read, which admittedly wasn’t much, this movie was the result of development hell and some agreements that were made to create it years before it finally came to be. Probably, it made a lot more sense to do a sequel so many years ago, and as it was strung along and changed hands, it became more and more of an obligation that simply had to be done, good script or direction be damned.
This movie is face-palmingly excruciating from start to finish. It is unapologetic in its shittiness. It seems to want to get this shit over with just as we do, and yet its 90 minute runtime feels like two hours. I cannot recommend it to anyone, not even as a Christmas film (which it hardly is). There is no plot description because I don’t want to think about this shit anymore.
Bad Santa 2 is Unwatchable and gets only a ★☆☆☆☆ because there is no unicode half-star symbol.
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