Bad Santa

You'd better watch out - Willie T. Soke is coming to town, and he doesn't care if you've been naughty or nice. Willie's favorite holiday tradition is to fill his sacks with loot lifted from shopping malls across the country. But this year his plot gets derailed by a wisecracking store detective, a sexy bartender, and a kid who's convinced Willie is the real Santa Claus.

Bad Santa landed as a genuinely transgressive holiday comedy — crude and mean-spirited by design, with critics largely in agreement that it works on its own audacious terms. The debate was less about quality than about tolerance: audiences and morality-minded critics balked at the film's deliberate desecration of Christmas iconography, while those who surrendered to it found it bracingly, absurdly funny.