Mark Waters

Now it’s ‘He’s All That.’

The opening of Bad Santa 2 feels exactly right The first movie gave its degenerate, safe-cracking mall Santa a glimmer of a happy ending, an absurd outcome for a man who had screwed and robbed and drank and cursed his way across a large swath of the Phoenix metro area. 12 years later, Bad Santa 2 finds its antihero back at rock bottom; alone, drunk, and broke. In a despairing voiceover, Billy Bob Thornton croaks out a treatise on the absence of happy endings in life — or any endings at all. Life, his Willie Soke muses, just goes on and on, consistently sucking forever. Then he writes a suicide note on an old pizza box and sticks his head in an oven.

After years of speculation and casual promises that eventually became very easy to brush off, a sequel to 2003's Bad Santa is finally happening — with a catch. While Billy Bob Thornton has been confirmed to return (obviously), director Terry Zwigoff will not be joining in on the mean-spirited holiday fun, with Mean Girls director Mark Waters taking his place.

There have been a number of Young Adult adaptations made of late -- arguably too many -- that focus on the growing pains of becoming an adult while dealing with a dystopian future, or magic, or vampires and werewolves. But though these movies have had their jokes, none have been pitched as comedies, and that might be where 'Vampire Academy' succeeds.