Bad Santa

A crude, whiskey-swilling, womanising conman who earns a buck posing as Father Christmas? That's the intriguing premise of this mean-spirited Christmas comedy, which is based on an original idea by the Coen brothers. Little of the Coens' typically good-natured humour has survived successive rewrites, but this twisted riff on A Christmas Carol strikes enough of its targets to make it worthwhile.

Thornton excels as Willie T. Stokes, a cynical, hard drinking conman who works a seasonal gig with his elf partner Marcus (Cox). Robbing the malls that have employed them, the pair have built up quite an operation over the years, despite their general acrimony towards each other. This season's mall, run by Bob Chipeska (the late John Ritter), has been selected, but things take an unexpected turn when Willie meets a bullied obese kid (Kelly) and crashes with his senile grandmother (Leachman).

Though the screenwriters are guilty of an over-reliance on foulmouthed tirades at the expense of developed characters and a plausible trajectory, Bad Santa's chief success is the performance of Billy Bob Thornton. A man for whom the expression world-weary seems to have been invented, he's a disarmingly deft comic actor, whose cynicism just about offsets the film's gentle drift towards seasonal sentimentality. It's a close call, though.