Dir: Terry Zwigoff
Starring: Billy Bob Thornton

"Nothing appears sacred, anymore, this is just not in the spirit of Walt Disney," a Disney Executive on Bad Santa.

Once upon a time we must have all popped the question, are you real, Santa? Sowing seminal seeds of doubt in young minds, Billy Bob Thornton's Santa replies, "Of course not, I'm an accountant, I just wear this suit as a fucking fashion statement." The tone is set for the whole of Bad Santa in which Thornton's Klaus starts off bad, and gets worse, through drinking, swearing, smoking, wetting his pants, robbing the safe to making love in the shopping mall's changing rooms. This is far, though, from being a one-joke movie spun into a series of gags. Rather the whole plot and the cast of characters revolve around an alternative vision of the Christmas experience.

Thornton is Willie T. Stokes, a boozed-up, nicotine-riddled, foul-mouthed and randy safecracker who teams up every year with a dwarf, to play Santa and his elf assistant in a shopping mall before robbing it on Christmas eve. This year sees the pair heading for Phoenix, Arizona, where things begin to go in quite a different direction than usual. He meets an eight-year-old misfit who isn't, let's say, the brightest bulb on the porch for whom Thornton is the real Santa Claus, on holiday in Arizona after sleeping with Mrs Santa's sister, apparently. He also meets a perky young Jewish girl with a fetishistic thing for Santa's woollies, and has run-ins with the mall manager whose pc jargon inhibits him from saying why Santa making out in the women's changing rooms could be a problem for the mall's image. In one smart scene, the manager is reduced to stuttering embarrassment at the accusation that firing the Santa and elf team would be regarded nationally as a blow against the rights of vertically-challenged people. There is too the street-wise store manager who has wisened up to the team's plan, and wants a slice of the cake.

Rather than simply scoring points against the Yuletide spirit, then, Bad Santa makes them against political correctness and the commercialisation of Christmas. Thornton's role is of course, designed to shock, but it showcases his talents wonderfully, and is more emotionally truthful than the great majority of major roles in films. If there is a sort of generic redemption of hero with child at the end, it only comes about by trashing every sacred cow that comes attached to the genre. There must be an interesting explanation of how some films have bad taste because they lack any concept of taste, and others have taste that is consciously, transgressively bad. This film enters the second category, of course, as do several films of the Coen brothers, who produced this movie. It's to be hoped that this film succeeds in wide market distribution rather than end up as a sort of revered oddball classic.

91 minutes, Certificate 15, Released 5th November