It’s a rare and dubious accomplishment when a film is so bad it makes you want to swear off movies forever. There is Showgirls bad. There is Battlefield Earth bad. There is even English Patient bad. (Sorry, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.) But there is a whole new level of bad now: Bad Santa 2 bad.

Bad Santa 2 is truly atrocious. I am as embarrassed to admit I watched it, with my parents no less, as I am embarrassed for the people involved in putting this piece of crap together. I usually try to find some redeeming value in a film or to try to find some scientific or artistic rationale for why peculiar choices were made in cinema. I have neither the ability nor the desire in this instance.

The original film was like a tobacco and rotgut flavored soufflé. It struck a tricky balance between exposing the fraudulent and demoralizing self-righteousness that commercialized Christmas in America has become with the desire to redeem and celebrate those most marginalized by our rampant and shallow pursuit of jolly holidays.

I used to love this most wonderful time of the year because it was a fair excuse to put blinders on, wallow in excess, and mainline jangly music and stop-motion mid century television specials as a wholesome narcotic to forget how screwed up everything is. The first Bad Santa, benefiting from the deftly sardonic touch of Terry Zwigoff (Ghost World), blew the doors off that hollow fantasy, but rebuilt a new, more relatable holiday out of the detritus, much like the pathetic advent calendar full of Band-Aids and aspirin Billy Bob Thorton presents to his young charge in the film. In its post 9/11 moment, the first film, embracing its own cynicism in a strong-armed, warm-hearted, wide-eyed bear hug, was a tonic for the creeping cynicism that afflicted us all.

The sequel? Not so much. Director Mark Waters (Freaky Friday, Mean Girls – dude, you are capable of so much more – what gives?) jettisons any appreciation for humanity, and gives us a sour sludge of a holiday fruitcake. Narrative beats from the first flick are robotically replicated wholesale, sans emotional context, and the whole enterprise seems to be engineered as a base, puerile, sophomoric gross out cash grab (yeah, those adjectives are pretty redundant, which shows how much I reviled this). The sequel seems reverse-engineered to make you completely loathe anything you might have ever liked in the original film.

The plot is a thin whisper, involving another heist, this time a children’s charity substituting for a shopping mall. Any characters from the first installment you loved or held in any affection – Cloris Leachman, Lauren Graham – are not only missing but vilified when mentioned in the second film.  And the two new characters introduced – the titular antihero’s mother (Kathy Bates) and a new “love” interest (Christina Hendricks) – are painted with such a reprehensibly broad brush, treated so heinously,  and framed with the ugliest of stereotypes, that they might as well be leftover political propaganda from our 2016 presidential election. To say the film is misogynist would be an understatement. To say the flick is utterly misanthropic would be right on the money.

Furthermore, it is an even rarer film that makes me dislike an actor so much that I will likely skip their future output. Congratulations, Billy Bob Thornton, Kathy Bates, and Christina Hendricks – you have pretty much fallen into the category of that obnoxious, foul-mouthed, drunken relative everybody avoids at the holiday dinner table.  I will give you three “thespians” this one thing: your commitment to ugliness and to contempt is astounding and thorough. Congratulations.

I really hated this movie. Bah humbug.

______________________

Reel Roy Reviews is now TWO books! You can purchase your copies by clicking here (print and digital). In addition to online ordering at Amazon or from the publisher Open Books, the first book is currently is being carried by Bookbound, Common Language Bookstore, and Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room in Ann Arbor, Michigan and by Green Brain Comics in Dearborn, Michigan. My mom Susie Duncan Sexton’s Secrets of an Old Typewriter series is also available on Amazon and at Bookbound and Common Language.