Bad San­ta 2

This is the kind of film you could imag­ine a booze-soaked depart­ment store San­ta Claus mak­ing in return for some pock­et change and a soiled deck of Lucky Strike. It gets the job done on the thinnest of thin mar­gins, but the fourth-rate hand­i­work is glar­ing­ly evi­dent in every slap­dash frame.

A gigan­tic (and slight­ly wor­ry­ing) 13 years after Ter­ry Zwigoff’s orig­i­nal lewd opus, south­ern sil­ver fox Bil­ly Bob Thorn­ton repris­es his role as said Christ­mas­time cur­mud­geon, trundling through the exact same coarse reper­toire as he did all that time ago, with invol­un­tary urine once more drib­bling into his fur-lined booties. Yet where the 2003 film drew on the trag­ic male self-lac­er­a­tion of Charles Bukows­ki and was, despite its super­fi­cial­ly pop­ulist façade, an art movie, this one seems pur­pose primed to be screened on the back of an air­plane seat with ​“Edit­ed For Con­tent” appear­ing as an open­ing inter-title.

Still, there is the feel­ing that no-one could play the unsmil­ing, nihilis­tic Willie Soke with the non­cha­lant rel­ish of Thorn­ton, his absolute com­mit­ment to sup­press­ing mean­ing­ful human rela­tions mak­ing him, if not the mod­ern day Mr Scrooge we need, then the mod­ern day Mr Scrooge we deserve. His dis­mal prospects and lack of human­i­ty are explained ear­ly on when he is recon­nect­ed with his equal­ly repul­sive moth­er, played by Kathy Bates, who regales him with rib­ald tales of youth­ful indis­cre­tion and sundry abus­es chalked up as ear­ly days life lessons.

A Chica­go children’s char­i­ty is the tar­get of a shod­di­ly exe­cut­ed heist, with Tony Cox’s dou­ble-cross­ing Mar­cus repris­ing his role from the first film as a vio­lent­ly dys­pep­tic helper elf. It real­ly is the exact same jokes repeat­ed over again, and no amount of inven­tive swear­ing can cov­er up for that. Maybe the extend­ed hia­tus between episodes is down to the fact that this is more of a remake than a sequel. The hope is we’d have for­got­ten every­thing from the first one, and would hap­pi­ly choke it all down once more.

Christi­na Hen­dricks turns up as the hap­py-clap­py face of the char­i­ty, while her hus­band, played by Ryan Hansen, is tee’d up as the bad­die of the piece (though nev­er real­ly mate­ri­alis­es as such). The film is sad­ly dri­ven by a smash-and-grab impulse, the quick laugh always trump­ing any depth, sto­ry, mean­ing, sur­prise, coher­ence or, whis­per it, poet­ry. The biggest bust of all is the return of Thur­man Mer­man (Brett Kel­ly), the tub­by latch-key block­head who is now as annoy­ing a screen pres­ence as his char­ac­ter is sup­posed to be to Willie.

If this thing does end up going on to make a ton of mon­ey at the box office (there real­ly isn’t that much com­pe­ti­tion terms of hol­i­day-themed come­dies in 2016), the prospect of spend­ing anoth­er 90-minute dirge with charm­ing derelict isn’t an alto­geth­er unpleas­ant one. It would be nice to get some writ­ers in with high­er ambi­tions than rack­ing up the very cheap cracks.