Stream It Or Skip It: ‘It’s a Wonderful Binge’ on Hulu, a Stoner Comedy in Which Everyone Gets Wasted on Christmas

This week on I Am SO High Right Now Theater is It’s a Wonderful Binge (now on Hulu), the sequel to 2020’s The Binge, which satirized The Purge by turning the violent-thriller premise into something you’ll likely only find funny after scarfing half a tin of high-octane cannabis gummies. As the Purges occur in a world where all laws are suspended for 24 hours, the Binges take place in a near future where drugs and alcohol may be legally consumed only one day out of the year. A few principals return from the first Binge to participate in the second, Xmas-themed movie – although it pains me to inform you that Vince Vaughn is out for this one, and Nick Swardson is in. Whether that’s a detriment or a boon may depend on whether or not your brain has been partially melted by recreational drugs.

IT’S A WONDERFUL BINGE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: OK, so, like, they moved the Binge to Dec. 24, because who wants to be sober while spending time with the family for Christmas? The post-2027 prohibition government probably did that as a populist smokescreen for some horrible legislation that bans kittens or legalizes bazookas for civilian use or gives health insurance companies carte blanche to bend us over and have their way with us OH RIGHT THEY ALREADY DO THAT. I digress! We reunite with Binge characters Andrew (Eduardo Franco) and Hags (Dexter Darden) as they work as plushied mascots at a children’s entertaino-overstimulatorium fun center, and get fired after the children start beating on them, and they beat them right back in slo-mo sequences in which little girls’ faces get punched and/or slammed into birthday cakes while “Joy to the World” plays on the soundtrack. So many LULZ!

Notably, this sequence has nothing to do with the rest of the movie, so here’s hoping you enjoyed it. Andrew goes home to his mother, sister, brother, two dads and his mother’s sensitive new-agey new boyfriend for the holiday. Yes, two dads. They’re not gay. They just fathered Andrew and his fraternal twin (is it the sister or brother? Can’t remember) within a short period of time and nobody knows which is the father of which kid, even though the one dad looks exactly like Andrew. It’s a rare medical anomaly for that to happen and hey, what strain is this bro, I’m losing the plot here! Meanwhile, Hags (what kind of a name is Hags? Is it short for something? Haggerty? Harger? Hamburglar?) plans to propose to his girlfriend Sarah (Zainne Saleh), but has to navigate her overprotective father (Tim Meadows), and deal with a whole to-do over the ring, which was given to him by Sarah’s coke-inhaling grandma and ends up being donated to an orphanage with a bunch of other gifts. Hey, we’ve all been there.

A highly tentative thread connects us to the other plot flotsam happening here: Andrew might be in a relationship with Kimmi (Marta Piekarz), but who the f— can tell? Maybe he just has a thing for her? I dunno. Anyway, she’s the daughter of the mayor (Kaitlin Olson), who’s staging a nice clean Xmas party and doing her damnedest not to let the Binge intrude on it. Her Christmas owl gets loose and consumes a big bag of drugs and starts attacking people, and she tasks Kimmi with catching it. Meanwhile, the mayor’s brother Kris (Swardson) shows up unexpectedly, having broken out of county and stolen a cop car. Meanwhile, Andrew, disillusioned with his extra-loud, extra-dysfunctional family, wanders through town wondering what it’d be like if he never was born (hey, the movie title had to come from somewhere) and ends up smoking veritable shitloads of angel dust with a guy named Angel (Danny Trejo!) who takes him on a tour of alternate realities so Andrew can see that the world probably would be a better place without him. And this all happens as everyone everywhere in America gets waaaaaaaaaaaassssteddddddddddddd.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: It’s a Wonderful Binge takes its cues from stoner comedies like Friday and the Cheech and Chongers, or even halfway-fine stuff like The Night Before, but has more in common with unforgettably forgettable shit like Grandma’s Boy and A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas.

Performance Worth Watching: TREJO, because TREJO. And he probably has two or three more movies coming out before the end of the year.

Memorable Dialogue: Hags: “What if Santa flies by and sees my penis?”

Sex and Skin: None. Santa doesn’t see Hags’ penis, and neither do we.

Our Take: On the stoner movie scale, It’s a Wonderful Binge looks like Merchant-Ivory compared to a Happy Madison production. So of course, being a notch better than the modern standard doesn’t mean it supersedes dreck – it’s just slightly less dreckier dreck. I admit to being perhaps the wrong audience for it, being high only on caffeinated seltzer, a substance that serves to hone my critical blade: This movie is f—in’ wack. It’s sloppy and dumb and wouldn’t know a good joke if it plummeted from the heavens like an apocalyptic asteroid. It has “Titcoin” jokes, cosmetology-school jokes, wacky-grandma bits, bits in which Santa Claus drops F-bombs, moronic Christmas carols about getting bltized, a dead-on-arrival wheeze of a parody of a heist movie, out-of-control wildlife and an instance of gastrointestinal distress. And there’s no better example of the film’s transcendent laziness than the gastrointestinal-distress subplot, which is dropped so unceremoniously, we never learn if the guy shit himself or what.

Perhaps we’re better off not knowing. The day-of-drunkenness premise is more of a backdrop for stupid bits that aren’t stupid enough to be funny, and aren’t wild enough to be subversive. No one and nothing is being challenged here, except maybe formulaic heist-movie plots? To be fair, the movie isn’t without fleeting – very fleeting – moments that set it above the typically grotesque Happy Madison outing. There’s an amusing homage to Claymation Christmas specials, some trademark Trejo gameness, and Swardson isn’t the repellent character he’s played in far too many lowbrow comedies like this. Meager pleasures, but pleasures nonetheless, I guess.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Can you be high enough to laugh at It’s a Wonderful Binge? Probably. But it might need to be accompanied by a surgeon general’s warning.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.