Four Christmases earns its place on the naughty list

By Jackie Ammons     12/4/08 6:00pm

Four Christmases may advertise itself as a funny, family-oriented Christmas movie, but it falls short on both claims. With comedy rooted in slapstick bathroom humor punctuated by bursts of tacky innuendo, it will leave the audience both disgusted and uncomfortable.The film introduces audiences to Kate (Rendition's Reese Witherspoon) and Brad (Fred Claus's Vince Vaughn), the modern couple whose commitment is to never commit to each other - or each other's families. Annoyed by the friction of both of their divorced sets of parents, Kate and Brad never visit their families and instead go on vacations over the holidays. One year, unfortunately, they are caught in the act of leaving for vacation and must visit every single parent: her sex-obsessed mom (Step Brothers' Mary Steenburgen), her surprisingly classy dad (Pride and Glory's Jon Voight), his New Age mom (Hot Rod's Sissy Spacek) and his redneck dad (Lucky You's Robert Duvall), along with all of their siblings (including Flicka's Tim McGraw and Iron Man's Jon Favreau). This gives a total of four Christmas celebrations, hence the title of the film.

Why Academy Award winner Witherspoon accepted a role in this film is a mystery. In this movie, her talent gets lost in a flat character whose most outstanding qualities are her cute face and sweet demeanor. The same goes for the four other Academy Award winners in the film - Duvall, Spacek, Steenburgen and Voight - whose distinguished skills as actors go to waste in this unpleasant motion picture.

Vaughn's part, on the other hand, is no surprise, as he fits quite well into the role of the annoying, prattling klutz with no emotional sensitivity, with his most notable scene in the movie involving his reenactment of an egomaniacal Joseph in a Christmas Nativity scene. Vaughn's character in Four Christmases is simply a reproduction of his other distasteful roles in movies like Fred Claus and The Breakup.

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More annoying than Vaughn in Four Christmases is the cheap humor dropped into the film via three instances of baby vomit, numerous punches in the stomach, wrestling matches and sexual innuendo. The innuendo remains present throughout the entirety of the film, with Kate's mother being simultaneously attracted to Kate's boyfriend and the church pastor, Brad's mother sleeping with Brad's best friend, and Brad's brother's only interactions with his wife involving sexual jokes. While the movie attempts to make this humorous, it is uninspired as a comedy and uncomfortable as a family Christmas film.

Yet another of the film's many flaws is that it relies on the all-star cast to compensate for its lack of creative plot. Without its distasteful humor and great actors and actresses such as Witherspoon, Spacek and Duvall, Four Christmases boils down to an uncommitted couple visiting their crazy families on Christmas and eventually finding some sense of commitment. While it attempts to be moving and to have some kind of emotional depth, the plot only ends up being boring, sappy and rather trite.

Four Christmases is painful to watch. Just as it is painful to continuously bear the film's ever-present baby vomit, it is painful to see quality actors sacrifice themselves to this mess of a movie whose only hope of success is that holiday movie-goers will fall for the word "Christmas" in the title. This film is more than enough annoyance for audiences to handle sanely; in fact, only one of the movie's Four Christmases would be far too much.

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