MJB SCRIPT REVIEW | BAD SANTA

“𝗜’𝗠 𝗢𝗡 𝗠𝗬 𝗙#%*𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗟𝗨𝗡𝗖𝗛 𝗕𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗞!” | 𝗠𝗝𝗕 𝗦𝗖𝗥𝗜𝗣𝗧 𝗥𝗘𝗩𝗜𝗘𝗪 - 𝗕𝗔𝗗 𝗦𝗔𝗡𝗧𝗔

Yaaayyy! Crimbo is here and I like to start December with my one anti-Xmas flick script review for the month; BAD SANTA

Plot in a nutshell: A miserable, alcoholic conman, Willie, and his partner, Marcus, pose as Santa and his Little Helper to rob department stores every Christmas Eve. But this Xmas, Willie runs into unforeseen problems when he befriends a troubled kid…

Imagine The Grinch. Imagine him as a low level, serial criminal. Imagine him with no fixed abode, conning kids into believing he’s Santa, just to give him a chance to survey the joint he’s robbing. And when he’s not doing that, he’s managing a serious drinking problem and the urge to have the worst kinds of sex with any willing woman he meets. And he swears. A lot. At everyone. Including small children. That’s Bad Santa. And it’s awesome

Written by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, with edits by the Coens and Terry Zwigoff, this is a neat 80 pages. You can easily hear Billy Bob Thornton in every line. As if it’s written for him. Willie is about as irredeemable as it’s possible to write. Proper R rated script too. Certainly catches your attention.

Then there is the atmosphere of the script. Scummy. Really scummy. I felt the need for a wash every third or fourth page, so dirty is Willies existence. Reminded me of so many of the Coens crime pieces, especially Blood Simple. But I digress.

What we have here is a classic R-rated comedy, with some heist movie thrown in and a good dose of sex comedy to round out the edges and create something for the more twisted grown up to enjoy. Which leads me to my favourite point; for a Xmas movie, it doesn’t carry that magic of Xmas. But it is set at Xmas. But Xmas isn’t the point of this movie. It’s the opportunity for these criminals to make money. And that’s a great anti-Xmas movie script right there

So what did I learn from 𝗕𝗔𝗗 𝗦𝗔𝗡𝗧𝗔?

1) Well, if you ever need to write a scene where someone tries to crawl through air ducts, there’s a couple of great sequences here for that.

2) The two sequences where Marcus attempts to traverse the superstore whilst trying to beat the alarm arming countdown is a fantastic use of action-count-action-count and a thrilling little sequence to copy, should you need to.

3) The atmosphere itself is very much of the world these characters inhabit. To concentrate on the characters AS the world, does nothing but benefit the overall story and keep the script rooted in a style that sets this script apart.

Already looking forward to a more Christmassy script next, but for now, this one is a beauty of an adult piece and a bunch of sweary fun. Scarily, it tempts me to write that really dark adult comedy that I haven’t written yet, with way too much swearing and that just endears this script to me more. Ah, to the joys of an adult comedy.

Link to the script;

https://thescriptsavant.com/movies/Bad_Santa.pdf