Vince Vaughn must be getting desperate. He appeared in a Christmas movie last year and apparently couldn’t get enough. (Does Fred Claus ring a bell? No? Congratulations, your memory’s normal.) He plays Brad, a blunt enemy of festive holidays, and along with his girlfriend Kate (Reese Witherspoon), has planned a holiday abroad to avoid the season’s merrymaking. You and I can probably identify with the roguish lies he makes up to avoid the annual family visits, but this plan goes awry when a thick fog sets in, stranding them at the airport. No big deal right? They later become victims of a spontaneous interview by a LIVE TV crew, and…well, the cat’s out of the bag, if we are to assume the families of both parties have their TVs on 24/7.

As you can imagine, both are then confronted by their kins, and this is where we find out what gave the film its title: Kate and Brad are forced into visiting not one, but each of their parents. “But wait, why four? Shouldn’t it just be two?” Nope, the writers have to fill out the 82 minutes, so all four parents are divorced. Comedy is squeezed out of the awkward and exaggerated situations when they proceed with visiting all of them. 

Witty at some parts, naughty the other, Four Christmases scores a few points for its daring and honesty. Vaughn delivers his best when he’s given all the sexual lines to toy with, while Witherspoon does okay with everything else. But apart from snorting or smirking time to time at some of the cleverer lines (“You can’t spell ‘families’ without ‘lies’! “), there’s nothing else to do but watch events unfold with an indifference. Four Christmases may have poked cheeky fun at repetitive Christmas traditions at the beginning, but gives in to the festive goodness towards the end. It goes from “hard as nails” to “soft as marshmallows”, and while one can appreciate that if done properly, Four Christmases feels more like a sell-out.

(First published at InCinemas)