12 Cynical Christmas Movies That Still Get Us into the Holiday Spirit

Christmas is nearly here, and it can all be a bit overwhelming — the singing, the dancing, the visions of sugar plums. And goodness, let’s not get started on the figgy pudding. Sometimes, people need something new.

Viewers aren’t total grinches, though. They don’t hate Christmas. They just want a little sour to cut through the sweetness — a bit of cynicism to make the happy endings feel that much better, that much more earned.

If you feel like one of the viewers described above, you’ve come to the right place. 

The Apartment

Bud Baxter (Jack Lemmon) has found the secret to climbing the corporate ladder: letting his bosses use his apartment to carry on their illicit affairs. Bud largely can swallow his moral qualms as the positive references rack up until the personnel director, Jeff Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), demands to be the next lodger. It’s then that Bud learns his office crush, Fran (Shirley MacLaine), is Sheldrake’s mistress.

As Bud tries to reconcile himself to either giving up on romance or career success, Fran attempts to come to terms with being not just the other woman, but only the most recent of Sheldrake’s other women. Emotional pain, job loss, and broken promises follow.

However, as the New Year rolls in, the two somehow find a deck of cards, a bottle of champagne, and the promise of a happy ending.

Bad Santa

Every year, Willie (Billy Bob Thornton) and Marcus (Tony Cox) run the same scam. Willie gets a job as a mall Santa, Marcus as an elf, and they spend a month getting to know the ins and outs of the place. By the end of the season, they’ve stolen enough to live high on the hog for 11 months. Then, come December, they’ll meet up to do it all over again.

Unfortunately, Willie’s drinking and womanizing have taken a toll on their partnership. To make matters worse, Willie has more or less stopped caring about anything, even getting the money. He thus finds something even worse to be than a drunk, philandering thief who pretends to be Santa to steal. Instead, he’s a drunk, philandering thief who pretends to be Santa to steal, and he’s gotten quite bad at it.

Somehow, even in this state, Willie convinces a boy (Brett Kelly) that he’s the actual Santa and the kindhearted Sue (Lauren Graham) that he’s worth her time. Of course, creating this trio of mismatched outcasts doesn’t make Willie a good man, but he is a slightly better one.

The ending somehow manages to both affirm Willie as a fairly repugnant person AND that there may be some decency in him yet. It’s a hard trick to pull off remaining loyal to the film’s pitch-black tone and give you hope, but Bad Santa does it. 

El Camino Christmas

Eric Norris (Luke Grimes) comes to town for just one reason: he wants to see if his father, who he has never met, still lives there. Somehow that leads to him getting beaten and arrested by a drunk, crooked cop, Carl (Vincent D’Onofrio), and the gullible Deputy Billy Calhoun (Dax Shepard).

Even more confusing is how that spurious arrest puts him on the path to being smack-dab in a hostage situation in a local liquor store with Larry (Tim Allen), a vet who drinks heavily to manage his PTSD, a young single mom Kate (Michelle Mylett) and her possible delayed or disabled son, a bleeding Carl, and the liquor store owner, Vicente (Emilio Rivera).

The cops are incompetent, a couple of the hostages are actively intoxicated, several individuals are excessively casual about firing their guns, and at least one person isn’t leaving that store alive. But it still manages to deliver some bittersweet fuzzies in the end, one of Tim Allen’s rare good live-action roles and far more laughs than our little plot description would suggest.

Gremlins

Randall Peltzer (Hoyt Axton) only wants to surprise his son, Billy (Zach Galligan), with a wholly unique Christmas gift when he stumbles upon a mogwai in an antique shop. While the creature in question, Gizmo, is adorable, he has three rules. Unfortunately, with an assist from a clumsy friend and a faulty alarm clock, Billy breaks two almost immediately. As a result, reptilian gremlins who destroy property, maim, and kill with surprising skill and amorality, overrun the small town quickly.

That, however, isn’t the most profoundly cynical aspect of Gremlins. For that, you have to wait for Kate (Phoebe Cates)—Billy’s girlfriend—to explain why she doesn’t like Christmas. It is a thing of mean-spirited, heartless comedy wonder, made all the better by Cates' deadly sincere delivery.

The uplift comes from the final confirmation that, despite all the chaos, Billy and Gizmo have bonded, and someday soon, perhaps, Billy will be capable of effectively looking after the little guy.

Happy Christmas

Just-dumped Jenny (Anna Kendrick) is a bit of a mess. In the hopes of finding solid ground, she moves in with her brother Jeff (Joe Swanberg, also writing, directing, and producing), his wife, Kelly (Melanie Lynskey), and their son, Jenny’s nephew. Instead, Jenny quickly upends their life, drinking far too much and seducing the babysitter, ultimately forcing the couple to acknowledge they’re not as happy as they portray. Plus, Jenny’s friend Carson (Lena Dunham) is just around all the time — and all this during the stress of the holiday season.

Still, Jenny’s presence unlocks something in Kelly. A scene where Jenny and Carson help Kelly write the moment the character in her novel loses her virginity is delightfully raunchy and grounded in a true moment of family and friend bonding. The witnessing of three people pouring themselves into helping each other gives it heart.

Home Alone

Any way you slice it, Home Alone is the story of an abandoned boy named Kevin (Macaulay Culkin) who defends his enormous suburban home from crooks looking to take advantage of people going away for the holidays by stealing everything not bolted down. Moreover, Kevin protects his house with such notable brutality that the thieves end up with concussions, nail wounds, burns, and an assortment of bodily contusions.

The family unit reasserts itself and the thieves are arrested, so there’s the happy ending. Until then, though, the movie drips with cynicism.

It’s a Wonderful Life

I know what you are thinking, and you’re mistaken. It’s a Wonderful Life has a happy ending, for sure, but we see some pretty grim stuff along the way.

First of all, the story only happens because George Bailey (James Stewart) no longer wishes to exist, and Clarence (Henry Travers) tries to talk him out of it by showing him what would happen if George never lived.

Or we can go even earlier than that. George is only on the bridge because a rich man, Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore), purposely concealed the whereabouts of a large missing sum of money. Potter knows it will destroy the Bailey Brothers Building and Loan and will likely get George sent to jail, so Potter does it for precisely that reason.

There’s also the pharmacist who kills a kid accidentally. And George’s brother dying young without George to save him leads to several more American troops dying in World War II. Or, worst of all, George’s wife, Mary (Donna Reed), ends up a spinster AND a librarian! (GASP! HORROR!)

Still, that ending is so uplifting, you forget all about how dark it gets before the dawn.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Nearly any Shane Black film could be on this list—and there is, in fact, another on the way—as the man loves setting his movies at Christmas. However, KKBB stands out as easily the funniest and most fully realized of the bunch.

Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr.) takes a job as an actor after auditioning prevents him from being caught and arrested. On set, he’s paired with a private investigator, “Gay” Perry (Val Kilmer), who’s going to help Lockhart seem plausible on-screen. Instead, they end up with a real, messy mystery on their hands. Before long, Lockhart’s childhood crush Harmony (Michelle Monaghan), dressed in a fetching Santa outfit, becomes entangled, too. As a result, several people end up dead, accusations of an affair hang over at least one person, and Lockhart loses a finger.

But it does it all laughing all the way and finds a few happy endings in the debris.

The Long Kiss Goodnight

As promised, here’s your second Shane Black film, this one with just a script from him. Unlike many Black vehicles, the Christmas setting proves to be a bit more than just set dressing.

The holidays should be a festive time. However, for Samantha Caine (Geena Davis), this season feels… unusually complicated. After a car accident gives her a concussion and she immediately kills a deer with her bare hands, she starts to feel like someone else.

Amidst the lights and tinsel, Samantha attempts to hash that out as government death squads suddenly seem to be everywhere she goes. She has to figure out who she is, why they all want her dead, how to find her kidnapped daughter, and how to save the Christmas parade (yes, really).

Rarely does one have to fire so many bullets or use so much C4 in pursuit of a happy ending, but, hey, the holidays can be difficult.

The Night Before

Three friends are bringing the curtain down on their traditional Christmas bacchanalia. For 14 years, Chris Roberts (Anthony Mackie) and Isaac Greenberg (Seth Rogen) have gotten together with childhood friend Ethan Miller (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) to distract him on his least favorite day. It began in 2001 when his parents died and provided them with years of wonderful memories. But times change. Isaac is about to be a dad, Chris is a professional football player, and Ethan seems as stuck in arrested development as ever.

Before they can bid the tradition adieu, however, they’ll need to consume significant amounts of drugs, have stress daydreams about their children becoming exotic dancers, start fights, attend and be tossed out of New York’s most exclusive Christmas party, and meet up repeatedly with the world’s most frightening drug dealer (Michael Shannon). Friendships fray, revelations are revealed, public proposals facilitated by Miley Cyrus are rejected.

Still, the film and the friends manage to discover a new path that finds a way to keep them together without substance abuse.

The Ref

First, yes, you will have to ignore the Kevin Spacey factor of it all. It’s excellent here, but if the man makes your skin crawl—and who could blame you—this is probably best to skip.

However, if you can separate the man from the role, The Ref is a bruisingly funny film about a WASP Christmas pushed to the brink by a thief and a marriage on the edge. Of all the films on this list, its ending is probably the gentlest. It does, admittedly, feel out of step with the rest of the film. It’s a bit too syrupy, considering the acid it spits from the start. However, it being Christmas and so darkly funny until then, one more easily forgives a too-happy ending. Especially given that it is a happy ending with several people still tied in ribbon and wrapping paper for the sin of being annoying and being at the wrong family dinner at the wrong time.

Come for Denis Leary at his most motormouthed while still feeling like a character; stay for Christine Baranski’s reading of the line, “Slipper socks, medium!”

Scrooged

While Ebenezer Scrooge is a cynical person in and of himself, an adaptation of A Christmas Carol that feels equal in cynicism is rare. Scrooged is that exception.

Part of it is undoubtedly the setting and the era. The business aspect of show business—specifically TV production here—tends towards fairly soulless depictions in most entertainment pieces. Even worse is the ’80s. Already a time that seemed cynical at the moment, it has only grown more so in the rearview.

Bill Murray’s performance as the Scrooge-esque character Frank Cross helps too as — unlike many Ebenezers — he doesn’t shrink as the ghosts come into his life. Instead, he remains as spiteful as ever, even in the face of his fear, until the film’s final moments.

And for the most cynical interpretation of A Christmas Carol, it only makes sense that it boasts the silliest, sweetest ending, a sing-along with puppets and children!