Four Christmases: Critic Reviews

It's four home-for-the-holidays comedies in one, and the variety-pack structure works for the movie: Each nightmare household has a wacked flavor all its own, and none wears out its welcome.

Four Christmases is refreshingly tart and lean, forgoing the usual schmaltz and syrup of the season.

In this egregious Christmas movie, Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon each demonstrate the classic "Hollywood romcom" face: waxy as a corpse, dead-eyed with self-loathing.

One and a half Christmases is about all that's worth celebrating in Four Christmases.

Several maraschino cherries short of a fruitcake.

When will filmmakers learn that if you start with Bad Santa and finish with It's a Wonderful Life, you just end up with curdled eggnog?

To brand, then dismiss, Four Christmases as a disappointment would be giving it too much credit -- never, for a second, did this New Line Cinema cast-off scream or even whisper decent in the run-up to its opening.

Think of it as fun tear-away wrapping on what's essentially a boring pair of socks.

Ho, ho, ho? No, no, no.

That's funny?

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 marginally better than most, with a few offbeat comic ideas, a reliably droll performance from Vaughn, and, as the parents, four watchable old troupers in search of a fat paycheck.

In the end, a musty procreation moral is left to push forth this flimsy plot -- and that's neither original nor particularly funny.

Is it funny? Yeah. Sometimes very.

[An] oddly misanthropic, occasionally amusing but thoroughly cheerless holiday attraction.

The difference between the average unfunny comedy and this one is the difference between Grandpa telling you knock-knock jokes and Grandpa telling you knock-knock jokes with his bathrobe open as his hand creeps up your thigh.

This comedy about a happy couple made miserable by having to visit four divorced parents begins with a bang but settles into sentiment so maudlin that even this cast can't save it.

It's Four Christmases in need of a wedding, or maybe a funeral.

Seems intent on being as generic and lowbrow as possible, with broad slapstick emphasized over witty dialogue or interesting characters.

This being a Christmas comedy of sorts, it demands a happy ending of sorts. And a moral too.

This is what happens when a successful indie documentary filmmaker gets sucked in by the Hollywood system.

Four Christmases to deliver a quadruple dose of dysfunctional family hijinks to genuinely dispiriting results.

Vaughn makes the movie tolerable here and there, but this kind of slapsticky physical comedy doesn't suit Witherspoon at all.