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'Four Christmases' as stale as 3-year-old fruitcake

By J. Todd Foster

Media General News Service

Published: December 1, 2008

How can a movie miss with five Oscar winners among its all-star cast? Yet "Four Christmases" is as stale as 3-year-old fruitcake, and even Reese Witherspoon, Vince Vaughn, Robert Duvall, Jon Voight, Jon Favreau and Mary Steenburgen can't rescue this farce.

Brad and Kate (Vaughn and Witherspoon) are a bliss-filled couple bent on globe-trotting and having fun while eschewing marriage and children. To avoid their families (both sets of parents are divorced) at each Christmas, Brad and Kate concoct elaborate hoaxes about traveling out of country to inoculate Burmese children or to help feed African children.

They travel out of country all right – to sunny beaches for massages and scuba diving. Except this Christmas, the Fiji-bound couple gets fogged in at the San Francisco airport and is busted by a live TV news interview. To make it up to their families, they agree to visit all four parents at each of their homes in one day. That's four houses, one day, spread out over the Northern California countryside. It's beyond a stretch.

The word "dysfunctional" doesn't begin to describe Brad and Kate's families. First up, Brad's father's home.

Brad is a Stanford-educated lawyer while his redneck brothers (Favreau and Tim McGraw) are cage fighters. Brad's father, Howard (Duvall) drives a combine.

When Brad isn't being body slammed on a hideous shag carpet, he's being mocked for being smart.

Next it's off to the home of Kate's mother (Steenburgen), an abode described as a "cougar's den" because of all the man-obsessed women who have gathered for the holidays. Steenburgen wears a white dress that was either painted or shoehorned on, although at age 55, she still has game.

Then comes a trip to see Brad's mother (Spacek, who like Duvall lives in the Charlottesville, Va., area), a free-love hippie chick who still eats marijuana-laced brownies.

The holiday from hell ends at the home of the only normal person in the movie, Kate's father (Voight).
The movie relies also exclusively on sight gags, often involving baby vomit, and on forced dialogue.

Each visit reopens childhood wounds and kills any humor buzz. It's like a "Meet the Parents" but without the laughs.

Then to wrap the whole affair up in a nice tidy bow, director Seth Gordon, in his first full-length feature, tries to get sentimental.

By that point, moviegoers are wishing they had rented "It's A Wonderful Life" and stayed at home.