FOUR CHRISTMASES - er..."mistletoe"?

FOUR CHRISTMASES is a piss-poor generic holiday season comedy starring Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon. I normally like Vaughn's motor-mouth humour and Reese Witherspoon was great in LEGALLY BLONDE but they struggle to keep this underwritten movie afloat. The jokes are too thin and too few - the "big message" too preachy and obvious - the whole enterprise such a blatant shake-down it made me ashamed to have colluded with it. The high concept is that Vaughn and Witherspoon think that they are a happy independent couple until they are guilted into visiting each of their parents one Christmas day. Naturally, the movie spends eighty minutes showing how "they fuck you up your mum and dad" before telling us that, actually, we should all be nice to our families, before then telling us, hey, it's okay to exclude them from major life events. Huh?

So this movie is crass and inconsistent. It's also poorly made - just look for those awful continuity errors with Witherspoon's wig. Frankly, the only mildly interesting thing in the whole flick was the Steve Wiebe cameo. Seriously, director Seth Gordon should go back to making docs than hiring himself out.

FOUR CHRISTMASES is on release in the US, UK, Canada, Singapore, the Philippines, Australia, Germany, Portugal, Russia and Iceland. It opens next weekend in the Czech Republic, Greece, Hong Kong and Poland. It opens on December 18th in Argentina, Croatia, Hungary, the Netherlands, Bulgaria and Estonia. It opens on Christmas day in Belgium and Brazil and on New Year's Eve in France.