Movie Reviews by Michael Phillips

Four Christmases Movie Review & Trailer

Question for Reese Witherspoon: Do you employ an agent, or a manager? Is this the best romantic comedy you could find?

Question for Vince Vaughn: Do you employ an agent, or a manager? Is this the best romantic comedy you could find?

The acrid, wince-worthy "Four Christmases" may well be part of the war on Christmas Bill O'Reilly's always fog-horning about. Christmas and Christianity will survive it. But barely.

This is director Seth Gordon's first narrative feature; he scored with his documentary "The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters," but "Four Christmases" is one shrill contrivance after another. Brad and Kate, three years along in their carefree life together in San Francisco, are meant to be a pair of charming cads who routinely lie to their respective divorced parents and relations about being unable to visit around the holidays.

They come up with elaborate excuses, pretending to be globe-trotting do-gooders, but in reality they're just sneaking off for some "them" time. This year it's Fiji, but bad weather strands Brad and Kate at the San Francisco airport, and they're interviewed on TV, and their families see it (all this is in the trailer), and to save face they speed-visit all four sets of caricatures in the film's radically misleading running time.

Eighty-two minutes -- that's not very long.

Yet when you're not laughing time becomes cruelly relative, and here the slapstick is eerily unfunny, whether it's Vaughn tumbling off a roof while messing with a satellite dish, or Witherspoon -- whose timing and charm are wasted on a nothing role -- getting trapped in an inflatable bounce-house with a bunch of venal preteens.

Robert Duvall plays Vaughn's loutish working-class father; Mary Steenburgen plays Witherspoon's born-again mother; and the cast is so much better than its material, it's hard to believe the actors live on the same planet as the screenwriters. As Vaughn's therapist mother, Sissy Spacek comes off best. But she's a rare bird of whom it truly can be said: She's always good. No matter how grim the material.

"Four Christmases" - 1 Star

MPAA rating: PG-13 (for some sexual humor and language).

Running time: 1:22.

Starring: Vince Vaughn (Brad); Reese Witherspoon (Kate); Robert Duvall (Howard); Jon Favreau (Denver); Mary Steenburgen (Marilyn); Dwight Yoakum (Pastor Phil); Kristin Chenoweth (Courtney); Jon Voight (Creighton); Sissy Spacek (Paula).

Directed by Seth Gordon; written by Matt R. Allen, Caleb Wilson, Jon Lucas and Scott Moore; photographed by Jeffrey L. Kimball; edited by Mark Helfrich and Melissa Kent; music by Alex Wurman and John O'Brien; production design by Shepherd Frankel; produced by Roger Birnbaum, Gary Barber and Jonathan Glickman. A Warner Bros. Pictures release.

"Four Christmases" Movie Trailer

 

About "Four Christmases"

In "Four Christmases", Reese Witherspoon stars with Vince Vaughn as an upscale, happily unmarried San Francisco couple, Kate and Brad, who find themselves socked in by fog on Christmas morning and as a result, their exotic vacation plans morphed into the family-centric holiday they had, until now, gleefully avoided.

Out of obligation an unable to escape they trudge to not one, not two, but four relative-choked festivities, increasingly mortified to find childhood fears raised, adolescent wounds reopened ... and their very future together uncertain. As Brad counts the hours to when he can get away from their parents, step-parents, siblings and an assortment of nieces and nephews, Kate is starting to hear the ticking of a different kind of clock.

And by the end of the day, she is beginning to wonder if their crazy families choices are not so crazy after all.

"Four Christmases" Movie Review - "Four Christmases" Stars Joseph Vince Vaughn & Reese Witherspoon

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