Deck the Halls: Critic Reviews

It's a holiday ritual: Each year, American moviegoers get the misanthropically stupid, plastic-satire-of- a-plastic-society Christmas comedy they deserve.

Mr. Broderick and Mr. DeVito look tired and out of sorts, and you can hardly blame them, given the picture's inept, curdled mixture of sappiness and crude humor.

I literally did not count a single laugh in the whole aimless schlep, except for the hucksters who made it, on their way to the bank.

How come the talk-radio blowhards never bring movies like this up when they're inveighing against the War on Christmas?

As reliable as your Aunt Harriet's sweet potato casserole, every holiday season brings a movie just like John Whitesell's Deck the Halls, in which otherwise sensible actors commit themselves to a cheerless exercise in jingle bell hell.

You cannot believe how excruciatingly awful this movie is.

... Deck the Halls has little to recommend it.

This one follows the depressing pattern of Surviving Christmas and Christmas With the Kranks: enforced holiday cheer gives way to bilious hatred, then hollow forgiveness.

... a mirthless comedy with Danny DeVito and Matthew Broderick as warring neighbors, can be described as whatever is the opposite of a Christmas classic.

... the film equivalent of a fruitcake or snowman sweater you don't want but can't regift.

It's not horrible, but every sight gag and 'real meaning of Christmas' speech has been seen and heard before, and it steals gratuitously from Chevy Chase's masterpiece National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation.

In essence a title and release date in search of a movie, Deck the Halls is a lifeless, workmanlike comedy conceived to provide holiday shoppers an inoffensive respite from the mall.

The ending is so sweet that it'll send your family out of the theater for 3 1/2 solid minutes of smiles before everyone starts drinking and pointing fingers again.

Does anybody in Hollywood celebrate Christmas anymore? You have to wonder, with the woeful Christmas fare that has been hurled at us the past few years.

As long as atrocious, fake-pine duds like this keep making their money back, there's no such thing as a Christmas that's too commercial.

Although it borrows ingredients from many familiar Christmas flicks, it's got a sly twinkle of its own.

I love the Christmas season, but there are times when I wish it would go away if only to save audiences from horrific experiences like this.

Deck the Halls muddles along with rote characters and unimaginative gags that will amuse very few.

It's disappointing to see Broderick and DeVito try to make mediocre material work.

Like a fatally snarled string of Christmas lights, Deck the Halls promises holiday cheer but delivers only frustration.

Makes us miss those Home Alone days...

The gags land like lumps of coal, but at least the unnatural mounds of fluffy white snow remain unsullied in the dreck.

Ah, another lifeless comedy for the holidays. It's just super to be reminded how mean-spirited and grotesquely commercial the Christmas season can be, isn't it?

The distasteful formula is even more sour and ham-handed than usual; Broderick's and DeVito's natural likeability never stands a chance.

a bit too faux-humbug for me