Plot: What’s it about?
I liked “Jackass”. Really I did. There’s something so pseudo-satisfying about watching a bunch of, well, jackasses do intentional harm to their bodies. But the days of “Jackass” might be behind us and various parts of the cast have moved onto bigger and better things. Or have they? As any viewer of “Jackass” knows, one of the standouts of the show was Bam Margera who was best-known for playing stunts on his parents. Bam went onto form his own reality show entitled, cleverly enough, “Viva la Bam”. I never caught an episode of that but after my brief research, I deduced that “Where the #$&% is Santa” is nothing more than an extended episode of that. Admittedly, I lost a lot of respect for Bam Margera (if I had any to begin with) during the course of this movie, if you can call it that. Bam’s obviously done very well for himself, enough to have his own house with a skate park inside it, a Range Rover for the wife and a Lamborghini for himself. Oh and he’s got an entourage, more on that later…
“Where the #$&% is Santa” might just be 90 minutes of my life that I want back. I mean really want back. I could have done something productive, like laundry or watching cars go by outside my window. Something. Anything. But no, Warner sent me a Blu-ray and I told them I’d review it, so here I am. We meet Bam and his group of supposed “friends” though I’m reminded of the old saying “with friends like these, who needs enemies?” Bam can’t think of what to get his princess wife for Christmas, so he figures that he’ll get her the one thing she doesn’t have he’ll go to Finland and fetch the “real” Santa from the Arctic Circle. Hey, it’s so simple it just might work right? Wrong. Bam and his group head off and end up in Helsinki where his “best” friend, Novak, is trying his best to have sex with any woman. You see, Bam has bet that his buddy will find a woman else he’ll have to have his wife go on a date with a less than desirable person back in Pennsylvania. If that’s not love (using your wife as a bet) then I don’t know what is.
The rest of the film follows the exploits of the group as they continue to swear, break things, hurt one another and even cut off hair and tattoo their stomachs. No, I’m not making this up. Do they reach the Arctic Circle and find Santa? What the #$&% do you think? Along the way, they continue to demoralize one another, run into lesser-known rock stars (that all happen to be favorite bands of Mr. Margera) and in general make a mockery of Americans in general. Now this begs the question as to will people like it or watch it? Honestly, I have no idea. Maybe if I were twenty years younger and had been drinking half the day (or all of the night before) I might find a bit of enjoyment out of it, but as it stands I just couldn’t wait for it to be over. Yes, there are a few “Jackass” moments here and there but more often than not, it’s just Bam doing whatever the #$&% he wants and to me, that’s just not too fun to watch. It’s more like a home movie that was made by Bam and his friends and somehow got Warner Brothers to distribute and sell it for a tidy profit. Watch at your own risk.
Video: How does it look?
I wish I could say that, despite the plot, this movie looked good. Well, sadly it doesn’t. Of all the movies that are not yet on Blu-ray, it’s a shame that this is one of the ones that made the cut. The movie was shot in Super 16 and it looks that way. Some of the shots look halfway decent, while most are very grainy and have a bit of edge enhancement on them. The 1.85:1 VC-1 HD transfer doesn’t really look any better than the standard DVD version (which, for some reason, I broke out for comparison purposes) so if you are going to put your money down for this movie, save your cash and get the stanadard DVD.
Audio: How does it sound?
Again, most movies either at least sound good if they don’t look good but this isn’t the case with Margera and company. This is about the first time that I’ve agreed with Warner to exclude a HD audio track from a Blu-ray disc. We have a standard Dolby Digital 5.1 track that sounds like it was made in a garage (actually, a majority of it was). Dialogue is very raspy and it actually sounds more like a mono track than anything else. The front channels come into play during some of the music montages, but not much more than that.
Supplements: What are the extras?
For those that want them, there’s about twenty minutes of deleted and additional scenes, a photo gallery and the original theatrical trailer.
