Turkey anyone?
Director: Seth Gordon Starring: Reese Witherspoon, Vince Vaughn, Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Jon Voight, Jon Favreau, Mary Steenburgen, Dwight Yoakam, Tim McGraw, Kristen Chenoweth, Colleen Camp, Katy Mixon, Steve Wiebe, Peter Billingsley, Brian Baumgartner, Patrick Van Horn Cert: 12 Region: B Length: 88mins Video: VC-1, 1080p, 1.85:1 Audio: Dolby TrueHD 5.1, Dolby Digital 5.1 Languages: English Subtitles: English (SDH)
Spending the holiday season with your family can be awkward enough, but throw in an after dinner viewing of Four Christmases and you'd be forgiven for wanting to jam the carving knife into your eye to escape the unbearable torture. It would certainly be more fun than watching this 'comedy' in which Vince Vaughn once again rambles on about nothing in particular for 90 minutes and Academy Award Winner Reese Witherspoon beats up children on a bouncy castle. Ho ho ho, Merry Christmas! Now where's that roasting fork for the other eye?
If you hadn't already guessed, Four Christmases is to be filed in the Abysmal Seasonal Fare cabinet next to Christmas With The Kranks, The Grinch and that other Vince Vaughn larf riot, Fred Claus. The distinct lack of good jokes, engaging characters or competent film-making here is uncharacteristic of director Seth Gordon, the man responsible for one of the best documentaries of recent memory: King of Kong. Then there's the fact there are no less than five Oscar winning actors in the cast - all of them utterly wasted. The only explanation for the involvement of Jon Voight, Sissy Spacek, Robert Duvall et all is that they each have very short scenes playing the parents of Witherspoon and Vaughn and thus had to do very little work for what they were paid. They certainly couldn't have been attracted by the wonky script; one that couldn't be touched (improved) during shooting due to the writers strike.
At the beginning of the film Kate and Brad (Witherspoon/Vaughn) are content with their unmarried status and excitedly planning their next holiday to Fiji. To avoid their respective families at Christmas they lie about doing charity work with kids abroad (wow, that'll endear them to the audience) but when their plane gets fogged in at the airport and their faces are plastered over the news, the jig is, as they say, up. What follows is less a narrative and more a series of awkward moments between Robert Duvall as Brad's stereotypical redneck father ("Boys, I don't want to speak ill of your mother, but she's a common street whore") and his violent brothers, one of whom is played by a surprisingly buff Jon Favreau. True to form, Kate's family, led by mother Mary Steenburgen, a devout Christian, turn out to be just as nightmarish by teasing her about her childhood weight problems and gender experimentation.
Just about every broad cliche is rolled out in the name of comedy and it fast becomes obvious that any childhood trauma of Kate and Brad's will somehow be made to tie in with their present situations. So when sister Kristen Chenoweth tells a story about Kate being tortured on a bouncy castle there just happens to be one outside at that very moment - one that Kate is forced to go on. These scenes should be about the characters facing their demons but they're undercut by crude humour - Kate's Granny keeps talking inappropriately about her sex life - and a total lack of empathy on the part of the audience. (Hitting a baby's head on a cupboard door isn't exactly up there with the parrot sketch in terms of hilarity).
