Billy Bob Thornton and Tony Cox play a Santa/elf pair that take up work each year at different malls in order to crack safes and loot the stores on Christmas Eve. The plan is pretty simple. Insert the pair as holiday transient workers and on Christmas Eve, leave Marcus (Cox) hidden in the Christmas scene so that he can cancel the mall's security the night of the caper. He lets Willie (Thornton) in and leads him to the safe where Willie shows what he's really good at (because it definitely isn't being Santa), cracking safes.
The problem is that Marcus has noticed Willie getting more drunk and self-destructive each year and he is starting to get fed up with it. Meanwhile, Willie runs into a kid (Brett Kelly) who seems very... very... very off. This portly child immediately bonds with the bad Santa, much to Willie's confusion. When someone raids his hotel, Willie needs a new place to stay until the heist is done, and since he knows the only one looking after this kid is his very elderly and out-of-it grandmother, he moves in. Willie also starts an odd relationship with Sue (Lauren Graham), who seems to have a strange fetish about Santa. In a strange way, Willie becomes a father figure for this kid and teaches him how to defend himself.
Since Willie seems to keep slipping up at the mall, the store manager, Chipeska (John Ritter), a very timid man, becomes suspicious of Willie and Marcus and asks the store detective, Gin (Bernie Mac) to look into the pair. When Gin researches the two and finds out exactly what they are up to, he inserts himself into their scheme for a whopping fifty percent of the cut. The movie comes to a head on Christmas Eve as Willie realizes he has started liking the kid and Marcus starts to wonder if he needs another safe crack.
There are very slight differences, from what I can tell, between the Unrated Version and the Director's Cut. The Unrated Version adds eleven minutes scattered throughout the movie. It's typically a minute here, 30 seconds there, but the overall feel is only slightly different between the two movies. There is a noticeable difference in the level of crudeness portrayed in the Unrated Version, but the story of the movie is basically the same.
People who already have a Blu-ray player, and have loved the other versions of this film might like to invest in this dual-version disc, but I would only recommend it if you are a really big fan of the movie, because the fact that it is in high definition isn't really a big draw here. It's mostly the fact that it contains multiple copies of the movie.
