Review: Bad Santa 2

Billy Bob Thornton returns as Willie T. Stokes, the boozing, cussing, thieving, sexed-up, and politically incorrect anti-hero in a Santa suit in Bad Santa 2. The belated sequel isn't all that bad, it's just that the shenanigans are stale and most everyone feels as if they're merely going through the motions.

Thirteen years may have passed since we last saw Willie, but it may as well be thirteen minutes for so little has changed. Whatever shred of a happy ending he may have had at the end of the first film is gone with the wind and he's tired enough of the "long, miserable nightmare" most of his life has been that he's trying to kill himself with various household items. Not that any of his attempts are working, so he finds himself lured by the promise of millions when former cohort Marcus (Tony Cox) comes to him with an idea for a heist that needs Willie's safecracking skills.

The target is a Chicago-based charity run by Diane (Christina Hendricks) and her slimeball of a husband Regent (Ryan Hansen), who is both cheating on his wife and siphoning funds from their organisation. Infiltrating the charity requires Willie and Marcus to reluctantly don their respective Santa and elf suits and, even more unfortunately for Willie, teaming up with his estranged mother Sunny, who is played to the hilt by Kathy Bates. Tattooed and spike-haired, Bates is without question the only good thing about Bad Santa 2 but even her gleefully crude and foul-mouthed performance is sucked into the ho-hum atmosphere that dominates the film.

Directed by Mark Waters and scripted by Johnny Rosenthal and Shauna Cross, Bad Santa 2 fulfills its requisite quota of raunch and sentimentality. The latter comes in the form of the returning Thurman Merman (Brett Kelly), the ever-supportive innocent whose still childlike nature can't help but guilt the cockles of Willie's misanthropic heart. The former is gamely inhabited by Hendricks, whose Diane professes to be a good girl who sometimes needs to be bad. Naturally, our Willie is more than willing to help her indulge her naughty side, even if it means traumatising little kids shopping for Christmas trees with their parents in the process.

Bad Santa 2

Directed by: Mark Waters

Written by: Johnny Rosenthal and Shauna Cross

Starring: Billy Bob Thornton, Kathy Bates, Tony Cox, Christina Hendricks, Brett Kelly, Ryan Hansen, Octavia Spencer