Shlock that doesn’t shock

There’s a lot of comfort to be derived from a film whose title is both premise and punchline. These are uncertain times, after all; we ought to savour rare assurances. Nocturnal Animals? Manchester By the Sea? Unthinkable that anybody could be seduced by such appellative opacity. No, what you really want is something like So I Married an Axe Murderer or Snakes on a Plane. Real titles; titles whose meaning is immediately, indisputably clear.

Bad Santa was just such a title — Santa of course not being what one would ordinarily call bad. That’s the joke, you see. The Bad Santa is a boorish, foul-mouthed boozer, an incorrigible hoodlum and lout, which is funny because it’s quite unexpected. Santa, a vulgar drunk! Imagine. It’s like the Dirty Grandpa or the Maniac Cop. Such comic superabundance promised by a name!

Well, it turns out that Bad Santa 2 is an even more richly evocative title than the numberless one borne by its predecessor. What that modest integer suggests is more of the same: repetition, duplication, redundancy. It brings to mind nothing more and nothing less than just another Bad Santa.

Billy Bob Thornton, increasingly removed (one can’t help but observe sadly) from any kind of critical glory, reprises his role as the eponymous yuletide yob, swinging fists and screwing by rote en route to (one can’t help but hope vainly) a prodigious paycheque, the same as before but now a decade closer to death — as are we all. Still the Bad Santa drinks and fights and feebly curses; still ne’er-do-well elf Marcus (Tony Cox) and incorruptible savant Thurman (Brett Kelly) remain by his side. Nary a gag has changed. Even the popular television actress making a thankless go of the silver screen returns in updated form: Lauren Graham (Gilmore Girls) is out, Christina Hendricks (Mad Men) is in.

Ah yes, and the Bad Santa has gained a matriarch: Kathy Bates has been persuaded to enter the vulgar fray as Thornton’s ill-natured mother, a character so selfconsciously outrageous that you can practically hear the canned sitcom hooting. It’s another running joke governed by the can-you-believe-it principle, as in “can you believe a 68-year-old woman is talking so frankly about oral sex!” Extraordinary, but it’s true. The Bad Santa has a very Bad Mum.

Is there truly nothing these Hollywood screenwriter types won’t do? One can hardly believe the lines of taste so cavalierly crossed: maternal politesse is obliterated (“go for her clitoris,” Mrs. Bad Santa crudely advises her son), dating rituals are vanquished at once (“how dirty is this?” demands Hendricks of Thornton, mid-coitus against a back-alley Dumpster). Endless is the wink-wink oh-nothey-didn’t jesting. Exhausting are the faux-defiant rib-nudging jibes. Perhaps these transgressions are a salve in PC-gone-mad times. Or perhaps they’re juvenile gimcracks about as clever or surprising as the witticism built into the film’s name. Ω

JAN THIJS / MIRAMAX Billy Bob Thornton reprises his role as the eponymous yuletide yob in Bad Santa 2.