Uncle Nick Movie Review: How To Drink Bad Santa Under The Table This Christmas

The actor behind the Uncle Nick of Uncle Nick, Brian Posehn, described the plot of Uncle Nick as “a drunk sad sack goes to Christmas to try to bone his step-niece.” Bad Santa can suck it.

While the Uncle Nick plot synopsis sounds like a movie the Farrelly brothers would pitch had they not put in their customary five minutes of brainstorming (I dare you to find a lazier bit of comedy writing than the scene they foisted upon Project Greenlight contestants), Uncle Nick is a meaner, sleazier creature, like a pink elephant sweating out years of heroin addiction in a locked room.

Uncle Nick himself is a shambling corpse of a man, his drinking less a means to charming grouchiness than a salve for a character just intelligent enough to know how badly he’s wasted his life. Brian Posehn drains his body of all its charm and over-indulgent huggability. Instead we get Uncle Nick, a man with real age, real aches and pains, and an old dick that looks like a boot-stamped molerat.

A cast of excellent character actors join Posehn in embodying a dysfunctional family destroying themselves and each other in Uncle Nick. As Uncle Nick’s younger brother Beau Ballinger finds that exact desperate twinkle afforded a cocksure, good-looking asshole too dim to understand his own dissatisfaction and restlessness. Missi Pyle and Scott Adsit play the only genuinely happy creatures in Uncle Nick: an unambitious couple who know to indulge their small pleasures to the hilt. Then there’s the rich family who has taken them all in (Uncle Nick’s brother has married into wealth). It’s hard not to feel for Jacob Houston’s Marcus, who seems to have no clue that the world he’s growing into is just a heaping pile of the same shit he hates about his family. Finally, there’s Paget Brewster and Melia Renee, as a mother and daughter who punish themselves with terrible men for reasons of idle boredom, sleazy thrills, and self-loathing.

Uncle Nick won’t be challenging Emmanuel Lubezki’s Oscar run with its visual richness. Largely housebound, Uncle Nick looks small, cheap and unambitious. Which, well, it is. Uncle Nick’s stab at larger, thematic heft only heightens the sense of sour-stakes and sleaze, as the dissolution of the family is paralleled with an elaborate retelling of the Ten Cent Beer Night riot at Cleveland Stadium. It’s a b-plot that gives Uncle Nick a very special sense of place—it is utterly a movie about Cleveland the Midwest—but also highlights the movie’s essential thinness.

Funny, but not uproarious, with a plot that sometimes treasures Uncle Nick’s story over the development of its other characters (the actors are valiantly three-dimensional, but Valerie, in particular, doesn’t get enough room to rise above her place as an object of lust), Uncle Nick feels stretched —but never boring—at 93 minutes.

Still, Uncle Nick slides by on slime. It’s refreshing to see cynicism given all the room it needs to spread its grimy wings. Christmas is hell and whatever slim consolation we eke has everything to do with us being stuck with each other.