Riddle me this: What do you get when you put a stellar cast with an impressive 18 Oscar nominations (5 of which were wins) among them into a single, hugely anticipated holiday movie?

A box office hit?

Nope.

Unfortunately this is a recipe for tons of underused talent, a series of forced laughs and 89 minutes of unremarkable storytelling. In short, you get the movie Four Christmases.

Human teddy bear, Vince Vaughn and America’s sweetheart Reese Witherspoon are cast together in this Christmas comedy as Brad and Kate, the seemingly perfect, senselessly happy, impossibly compatible and adorably lovey-dovey couple everybody loves to hate.

The twosome have been spending every Christmas on vacations, gallivanting around the world- under an umbrella of made up stories- to avoid visiting their respective dysfunctional families (“You really can’t spell ‘families’ without the lies,” laughs Brad) whenever the festive season rolls around.

Unfortunately this year, bad weather has ruined their Christmas travel plans and Brad and Kate end up stranded at San Francisco’s airport – only to be caught on camera by a local television crew. Their charade now irrevocably exposed, the couple are forced to pay a dreaded visit to the 4 different branches of kin whom they’ve been religiously evading for years.

As the movie’s tagline tells it, on their Christmas visit list were “his father, her mother, his mother and her father all in one day”.

Are you confused already? Don’t worry. It only gets worst.

On his side, Brad has a divorced red-necked dad (Robert Duvall), 2 violent, highly abusive brothers, “Denver” (Jon Favreau) and “Dallas” (Tim McGraw), and a hippie mum (Sissy Spacek) – who’s dating Brad’s ex best friend- to contend with.

Kate, on the other hand, has her own divorced father, a flighty, ‘couger’ of a mother (Mary Steenburgen) and her highly competitive sister (Kristin Chenoweth) to visit.

In between the houses, Kate and Brad meet with various siblings related ‘accidents’, and are confronted with the ugly truth of each others’ pasts. They end up trampled on by little children, wrestled to the ground and even cornered to become Mary and Joseph for a Christmas play.

Each house is more different than the previous, and comes with its own series of atrocious obstacles that would have been great fun to watch, if only the story didn’t seem so haphazardly pieced together.

Faster than you can mutter “Merry Christmas”, the jokes and gags fall flat, and the movie begins its long and tiresome journey downhill. Admittedly, there were a couple of good laughs along the way, but they were few and far between. The movie ends up becoming a drag to sit through, as audiences desperately fidget in their seats.

Four Christmases is sadly trite and unoriginal, with a seemingly forced happy ending that could have been predicted right from the start. The real stars of the show were not the two leads, but the supporting actors who saved the show from thoroughly flopping.

Katy Mixon in particular,  shined as Brad’s nonchalant sister in law, who unwittingly showed Kate the true importance of communication in a relationship. Watch out for her hilarious lines delivered with straight face complete with a dead stare.

Reese Witherspoon seemed more believable (and much funnier) playing a blonde bimbo, than dishing out the desperate physical comedy used in Four Christmases. The lack of chemistry between Witherspoon and Vaughn may also explain his bumbling performance here – a stark contrast to Vaughn’s previous successes such as The Breakup and Wedding Crashers.

The movie never quite flows, struggling its way from one scene to another; giving viewers a disjointed feel as the story unfolds. You’re likely to leave the cinema thinking about anything from your untied shoelace to old aunty Nancy’s ailing cat, than pondering the movie’s unimaginative storyline, or immersing in the feel good Christmas spirit.

For a comedy that was brimming with so much talent and potential at the start, Four Christmases, unfortunately, feels more like Four Weddings.. that became funerals.

UrbanWire gives Four Christmases 2 out of 5 stars.

Movie details

Release date: Nov 27
Language: English
Rating: PG/Sexual References
Genre: Comedy/Romance
Starring: Reese Witherspoon, Vince Vaughn, Robert Duvall, Jon Favreau, Kristin Chenoweth
Directed by: Seth Gordon

(Pictures courtesy of Shaw Movies and the Internet Movie Database)