Reese Witherspoon and Vince Vaughn star in Four Christmases, a blockbuster Hollywood hit.
This year’s holiday blockbuster hit is Four Christmases, starring Reese Witherspoon and Vince Vaughn. As you can imagine, it has all the wonderfully humiliating scenes you’ve come to expect from the annual holiday comedy film: embarrassing bodily functions, physical injuries (head or crotch, take your pick), an unbelievable parade of “quirky” family members, and somehow in the end, the same heartwarming message of love and that because family is family, all misdeeds are forgiven. I have no rational explanation for it, but for some reason, that same tried and true holiday comedy formula continues to work, and the proof is in this year’s Four Christmases. The film raised $31.7 million this last weekend and was Hollywood’s second-biggest Thanksgiving opening ever, according to studio estimates, which is sadly a better box office pull than these wonderful holiday films were able to manage. It helped that Four Christmases had the holiday-themed movie market virtually to itself, but seriously, what is it about these movies that keeps people coming back for more?
None of the families are too dramatic or funny, which ends up making the movie repetitious. Vaughn and Witherspoon are so mismatched, it’s easy to believe the rumors of them not getting along on set. Most of the funny moments you see on the trailer didn’t even make it into the film.
So I ask again, why is it that every year there’s a holiday comedy recycling the same formulaic jokes and the same underlying message? It’s about as painful as having to taste that rock-hard fruitcake every season, but according to the box office, this fruitcake of a film is a huge hit–people just keep eating it up year after year. Maybe it’s just something about the holidays that makes us full of goodwill, willing to give a bad movie plot one more chance at redemption. Maybe it’s that Christmas spirit deep down inside us all that thinks, “They can’t ALL be bad. This year’s has to be better, or at least better than last year’s.” Or perhaps it’s the mind-numbing, memory-altering drug created from an overdose of holiday candy, bright blinking Christmas lights, in-laws, and horrible holiday sweaters that makes us forget, year after year, that yes, we have actually seen this movie before. And we didn’t like it.
This year, I recommend we pass on the stale movies, and the fruitcake.
I’ll see it just to watch Reese Witherspoon for an hour or so. Where has she been for since “Cruel Intentions”, doing real movies? C’mon Reese