{"id":7726,"date":"2024-10-30T22:55:56","date_gmt":"2024-10-31T02:55:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=7726"},"modified":"2024-10-30T22:55:56","modified_gmt":"2024-10-31T02:55:56","slug":"four-christmases","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2024\/10\/30\/four-christmases\/","title":{"rendered":"Four Christmases"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Four Christmases <\/strong>(2008)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 New Line Cinema\/Comedy\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 88 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated PG-13 (language, sexual humor, violent content)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Seth Gordon\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Matt Allen, Caleb Wilson, Scott Moore and Jon Lucas\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Alex Wurman\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Jeffrey L. Kimball\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: November 26, 2008 (US)\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Vince Vaughn, Reese Witherspoon, Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Jon Voight, Mary Steenburgen, Kristen Chenoweth, Jon Favreau, Tim McGraw, Katy Mixon, Dwight Yoakam, Carol Kane, Colleen Camp, Patrick Van Horn, True Bella, Skyler Gisondo, Zak Boggan, Jeanette Miller, Jack Donner.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Box Office: $120.1M (US)\/ $163.7M (World)<\/p>\n

Rating<\/strong>: NO STARS!!!<\/p>\n

HOW THE HELL DID Four Christmases <\/strong>MAKE $120 MILLION?! That\u2019s the question I\u2019m still asking sixteen years later. The nicest thing I can say about this spectacularly unfunny holiday comedy is that it\u2019s not quite as bad as Christmas with the Kranks. That\u2019s still not saying very much so please don\u2019t take that as any form of praise. Praise is the very last thing that I want to heap upon this mean-spirited bit of holiday entertainment.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Derision, that\u2019s another story. Four Christmases<\/strong> deserves as much scorn as one can muster. It\u2019s terrible beyond belief. I HATED it with every fiber of my being. I got angrier and angrier as I watched it. The way the families behave towards the main characters doesn\u2019t just border on abuse, it is abuse. It\u2019s easy to understand why Brad (Vaughn, Wedding Crashers) and Kate (Witherspoon, Walk the Line) don\u2019t want to spend Christmas with their families. Their respective families are horrible. I\u2019ll go more into that in a moment.<\/p>\n

\u00a0First, let me just say there is nothing even remotely entertaining about Four Christmases<\/strong>. Apparently, a lot of people disagree with that based on its box office take. I did a double take when I saw that figure. I can\u2019t believe it went over with audiences. It boggles the mind to think anybody would find this wretched movie even mildly amusing. In the words of my dearly departed mother, it\u2019s not even a little bit funny.<\/p>\n

\u00a0I\u2019ve never been much of a fan of movies or TV shows where families are mean to each other. I had to stop watching Married with Children and Malcolm in the Middle for this very reason. Al Bundy is a hilarious character, but I got sick and tired of watching how horribly he was treated by his wife and kids. I felt this intense surge of rage rising within me as I slowly realized that Brad and Kate were just going to take all the crap thrown at them. Four Christmases<\/strong> is the kind of movie that makes you side with the Grinch in his desire to put a stop to Christmas festivities. He should steal all copies and negatives of this nasty-tasting Christmas cookie. He\u2019d be doing the world a favor.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The title refers to the four different Christmas visits (both sets of parents are divorced) that Brad and Kate must make after their flight to Fiji is cancelled due to weather conditions. Since Four Christmases<\/strong> is set in San Francisco, it should come as no surprise that this means heavy fog. With every outbound flight cancelled, the couple find themselves stranded at the airport with all the other holiday travelers. Making matters worse, a news crew ambushes them and interviews them on camera live. Now that everybody in the city (including their families) knows they\u2019re not going anywhere, they have no choice but to spend the holidays with their dreaded families, something they\u2019ve successfully managed to do for years.<\/p>\n

\u00a0They first visit Brad\u2019s father (Duvall, Tender Mercies) and brothers (Favreau and McGraw). The two brothers are professional UFC fighters. This means that they physically assault Brad at every opportunity. It\u2019s not just playful brotherly horsing around either, it\u2019s for real! One of them even allows his young sons to get in on the action. Everybody in that house constantly puts him down and embarrasses him. They don\u2019t even appreciate the expensive gifts he brings.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Next stop: Kate\u2019s mother (Steenburgen, Elf). It\u2019s obvious she favors Kate\u2019s perfect sister (Chenoweth, Deck the Halls) because she blessed her with grandchildren. Okay, the sister is a bitch and her young daughter is a rotten little brat. I won\u2019t go into specifics, but the kid makes Kate chase her into a moonbounce in the backyard in order to retrieve a personal item that she grabbed. Things go from bad to worse when Kate\u2019s mother volunteers her to play the Virgin Mary in a Nativity reenactment at church. As the day progresses , Brad and Kate learn embarrassing secrets about each other. Kate starts thinking that she might want a marriage and children, but Brad is adamant about keeping things exactly as they are.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Their day also includes an uncomfortable visit with Brad\u2019s mother (Spacek, Coal Miner\u2019s Daughter) and her much younger husband (Van Horn, Swingers) who also happens to be his childhood friend. I\u2019m going to stop here, I don\u2019t see the point in saying anymore about the storyline. None of it is funny and we all know damn well that it will culminate in a heartwarming feel-good ending. Did I say heartwarming? That may have been the intention of the filmmakers, but it\u2019s more likely to cause heartburn than anything else.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Words can\u2019t adequately express my loathing of Four Christmases<\/strong>. It\u2019s mean-spirited, obnoxious, annoying and moronic. This movie is abysmal. I\u2019m not a particular fan of Vince Vaughn. I don\u2019t think he\u2019s funny; he\u2019s not even that good of an actor. His character here is thoughtless and selfish which makes it near impossible to feel any sympathy for him while his family mistreats him. I felt a bit more sympathy for Kate, but lost a bit of respect for Reese Witherspoon in the process. She\u2019s an intelligent woman, what the hell is she doing in this lousy movie? At least Kate stood up for herself against those rotten kids in the moonbounce.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Four Christmases<\/strong> is a complete waste of a lot of things, but mostly talent. The cast boasts no less than five Oscar winners- Witherspoon, Duvall, Steenburgen, Spacek and Voight (as Kate\u2019s father). Really, they should have known better than to get involved with this miserable excuse for a comedy. By all rights, it should have effectively ended the career of director Seth Gordon, making his feature film debut after the documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. He makes all the wrong moves here, especially by opting for a feel-good ending that rings as false as a knock-off Prada handbag. At Kate\u2019s father\u2019s (Voight, Coming Home) house, we\u2019re supposed to believe all is hunky-dory between her and the family members who were so awful to her earlier in the day. I call BS! Major BS! Christmas may be a time of forgiveness, but I don\u2019t see how Kate can so easily forgive the humiliation to which they subjected her.<\/p>\n

\u00a0I could go on and on with my reasons for despising Four Christmases<\/strong>, but I don\u2019t want to sound like some sort of madman so I\u2019ll just leave it at this. Skip this one. It\u2019s not funny, it\u2019s not heartwarming and it\u2019s not even remotely entertaining. It\u2019s the cinematic equivalent to a lump of reindeer crap in your stocking.\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Four Christmases (2008)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 New Line Cinema\/Comedy\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 88 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated PG-13 (language, sexual humor, violent content)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Seth Gordon\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Matt Allen, Caleb Wilson, Scott Moore and Jon Lucas\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Alex Wurman\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Jeffrey L. Kimball\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: November 26, 2008 (US)\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Vince Vaughn, Reese Witherspoon, Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Jon Voight, Mary Steenburgen, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7817,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,12,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-comedies","category-holiday-movies","category-this-sucks-so-bad"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/Four-Christmases-PIC.jpg?fit=620%2C348&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7726"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7726\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7819,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7726\/revisions\/7819"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}