Dear Santa,
Why is it that no one seems to know how to make a good Christmas movie anymore? The last holiday film that I truly loved was “Love Actually”, which was released back in 2003. Since then, there have been a few that I liked (“The Family Stone” and “Fred Claus”), but being who you are, I think you have the right to protest this slew of lame and awful holiday-themed comedies or at the very least leave giant lumps of coal in the stockings of all these producers. It’s movies like “Four Christmases” that demonstrate how little Hollywood knows about making Christmas movies.
Instead of incorporating good and witty humor into their storylines, much like what I know has to be your personal favorite, “The Santa Clause”, producers these days seem to think audiences won’t come to see Christmas movies unless they’re filled with dumb slapstick humor (not the funny kind like in “Home Alone”) and bathroom humor. “Four Christmases” is filled with that stuff; it has a baby vomiting on a person on more than one occasion, a little girl inadvertently sticking a pregnancy test in her mouth after it’s been used and a man being pummeled by his UFC-trained “cage” wrestling brothers. By now Santa, you’re probably rubbing your forehead in frustration, and I share the sentiment. Obviously, you know that Christmas is better than a bad joke that falls flat on its face in almost every scene; with movies like “Four Christmases”, the good name of Christmas is getting dragged through the melted snow, and I think you should finally take action.
The movie stars Vince Vaughn (you know, that guy you almost had sued last year for using your brother’s name in a movie without your permission) and Reese Witherspoon. Their characters’ names are Brad and Kate, and they are an unmarried couple who are very content that way. Every year at Christmas, they create some elaborate, diabolical minefield of lies to get them out of actually spending time with their families so that they can take vacations to various tropical locations. If you actually delivered coal to adults, this pair would have enough to run their fireplace all winter. Each of Brad and Kate’s parents is divorced, so when their holiday trip to Fiji gets canceled due to major fog, they have no choice but to make the rounds to all four parental figures, hence the title “Four Christmases”. And Santa, if you’re wondering why Brad and Kate couldn’t just invite everyone over to their house, the answer is simply because then there wouldn’t be setups for different fun gags at each residence.
The parents are portrayed by Robert Duvall, Mary Steenburgen, Sissy Spacek and Jon Voight, visited in that order. What follows is a series of failed gags involving Vince Vaughn getting beat up and thrown around, and Reese Witherspoon being spit up on by babies and being attacked by children in a Moonbounce. Man, do I wish you could have come in and worked on this script!
So, I put together a short list for you of suggestions for fixing this and future potential Hollywood Christmas scripts:
1. Jokes that are actually funny. The jokes in this movie especially stink worse than expired eggnog, in particular the ones involving breast-feeding and baby vomit. This brings me to the next suggestion.
2. No babies vomiting, projectile vomiting, peeing on people or excreting any other bodily fluid while a character is within the target area. Putting stuff like that into a movie clearly shows how desperate you’re becoming, and you don’t want that to taint your image.
3. And finally, if you’re gonna have such refined actors in the roles of parents, make sure you actually give them something to do besides reading off perfunctory dialogue specifically written to cut down the actors playing their children. Otherwise, it’s all too clear that they’re in the movie just to dupe their own longtime fans into being robbed of their time and money.
I hope these are helpful suggestions and that I have successfully put you on alert for future bad Christmas movies. Oh, and this year, you can skip the houses of the four, count ‘em, four, writers who penned this screenplay.
I’m making my list of the year’s worst movies and checking it twice to make sure this movie is on it. Just one more question: are there any plans to progress to something worse than coal in stockings?
Rating: 1 star
