Sometimes, a movie comes along that perfectly captures a moment in time, a work of art that catches the currents of history and culture and rides them like an eagle soaring high above the earth. And sometimes a movie, through miscalculation or sheer bad luck, strays into a downdraft and winds up smashed to pieces on the rocks below. Bad Santa 2 is one of the latter.
Looked at from a certain angle, this ought to be Bad Santa 2’s chance to shine. After an upset presidential victory variously attributed to the power of the white working class and a backlash against political correctness, a comedy about an alcoholic safecracker who spews casually insensitive insults ought to land right in the national sweet spot. Billy Bob Thornton’s button-pushing scoundrel revels in tweaking the sensibilities of sensitive liberal types, and when we meet his mother, played by Kathy Bates, we find out where he gets it from. When Tony Cox’s little person looks askance at Bates asking Thornton whether he’s a midget or a dwarf, she responds with the blunt bravado of one of Donald Trump’s less wily surrogates: “I don’t speak politically correct, so if you got a problem with that, take it up with the Lollipop Guild.”
Like the original Bad Santa, which was released in 2003, the sequel revels in self-conscious bad taste. Brett Kelly, who played a guileless 8-year-old in the first film, returns as a full-grown adult, but the sequel’s conceit is that he still has the mind of the child. Thornton’s character calls him a “retard,” but Kelly chirps back, “I’m top of the spectrum!” (At long last, someone mines the rich, untapped vein of autism humor.) The new film opens with a sequence where Thornton ogles a voluptuous woman breast-feeding an infant in slow motion, and it goes downhill from there.
Bad Santa, which was directed by Terry Zwigoff and written by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, became a substantial hit by playing both ends against the middle: Conservative audiences could reveal in its anti-P.C. sentiments, and liberals could enjoy having their sensibilities modestly tweaked, secure in the knowledge that Thornton’s despicable protagonist would see the error of his ways before the end credits. But Bad Santa 2—for which neither the original movie’s director or writers return—feels like it will please neither side, even though the swing-state audience I saw it with laughed heartily at some of its jokes. Given the surge in openly hateful rhetoric that accompanied Donald Trump’s campaign and has intensified since his victory, off-color jokes about sterilizing black people are longer pushing the envelope; they’re well inside it. Even the conservative New York Post critic Kyle Smith wrote that the movie’s concept has lost its sting “now that we’re headed for a Bad Santa presidency.”
If liberals aren’t in the mood to have their safe spaces violated, conservatives are equally likely to be unsatisfied by Bad Santa 2’s mild attacks on trigger-warning culture. The red states have been thrown too much red meat for its table scraps to have much appeal. And besides, they’re not likely to be fooled once it becomes clear that the story is building toward a pat Hollywood homily about families of choice. The movie promises scorched earth, but it delivers barely enough heat to toast a marshmallow.
Our nation seems more divided than ever, our sense of civic unity fractured beyond repair. But given the recent lackluster performance of several hotly anticipated sequels and franchise entries, perhaps there’s one thing we can all agree on: Bad Santa 2 is not a movie that ever needed to be made.
