Four Christmases

I think it's pretty hard to make a bad holiday movie. At the most it might be too sappy or sentimental but usually inoffensive, something you could leave playing on the TV while baking the holiday cookies. Four Christmases seems to go out of its way to show some really offensive people, I suppose in an attempt to show how the main characters played by Vince Vaughan and Reese Witherspoon have legitimate reasons for abandoning their respective families during the holiday season.

Brad and Kate (Vaughan and Witherspoon, who also were some of the co-producers of this film), both of divorced parents, lie to their families that they cannot join them for the Christmas holidays due to job commitments. They actually have an exotic vacation planned for themselves. But when they are seen on TV during a news segment about airports being snowed in, their families insist they visit all four of them at their respective homes.

We see the broad comedic hijinks that take place at each of the homes, filled with precocious and bullying kids, and parents (Robert Duvall, Mary Steenburgen, Sissy Spacek, Jon Voight) who insist on having things their own way, of course making it a pretty miserable four visits for the couple. Along the way, Brad and Kate learn things about each other that at first damage their relationship then bring them closer.

This is mostly a broad comedy, with nothing too new in the way of jokes. Out of all the actors, Vince Vaughan was actually not bad, I always think of him as an SOB but he made Brad pretty likeable. But that was contrasted to the rest of the characters. Some the actors playing parents, Duvall and Spacek, had such bad roles that I don't know why they didn't insist on some rewriting. Steenburgen played a pretty common role for herself, a "cougar." Voight, as the last visited parent, of course had the emotional heart that Brad and Kate were supposed to relate to.

The kid characters were monstrous, vulgar and ill-mannered, these are not the types of child actors' careers that turn into the Lindsay Lohans of tomorrow. Brad's family had a violent and foulmouthed kid who was into cage fighting (like the rest of the men in the family) and Kate had a niece who taunted another aunt, basicaly a mean girl in the making.

With the families being such bad characters, the film really needed to show how each of the four families had a heart or soul for the audience to sympathize with, and to make Brad and Kate realize that even with their families' flaws, they are "Family" that one cannot abandon or disown. I didn't find this at all in the story, or it wasn't done realistically enough for me to care (even if it is just a comedy). As expected, there is a happy ending. I did laugh a couple times, when the brother and his wife were playing a board game. But there was little holiday joy in this movie.