Movie Review: “Four Christmases”
Rating: 40
“Four Christmases” plays like frenetic holiday episodes for four sit-coms, haphazardly stitched together by the hit-and-miss chemistry of its stars, Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon. To its credit, Seth Gordon’s narrative debut after his smashing documentary “The King of Kong” contains a few belly laughs, but this Yuletide dish’s bellyaches are just as plentiful.
Brad and Kate (Vaughn and Witherspoon) are two unmarried up-and-comers from divorced families, and given their bizarre relatives, their aversion to marriage is wholly justifiable. Every year, Kate and Brad make up a story about immunizing children in Myanmar or solving the glacial melting on Mt. Kilimanjaro to get out of spending Christmas with their insane families.
But the ruse falls flat when San Francisco’s airport gets fogged in and a local news station interviews Brad and Kate, clearly on their way to a tropical paradise. The four factions — a violent hick, a cradle-robbing earth mother, a serial monogamist and a semi-Norman Rockwell ideal — call them on their dishonesty, forcing the couple to pull a Christmas marathon in which they see each parent in his and her own odd natural habitat.
The comedy is frontloaded with Oscar gold, but such talent as Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Mary Steenburgen and Jon Voight are not needed to play these cardboard archetypes. But this multiplied “Meet the Parents” lacks the measured comic tension of that film, and while Witherspoon is a willing participant in this endless slapstick, this Oscar emeritus feels out of place in all the wackiness.
This is a second-in-a-row Christmas swing-and-a-miss for Vaughn: last year’s “Fred Claus” was notable for its lavish sets and threadbare laughs. Perhaps he can do less damage with Arbor Day.
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