Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon

(On TV, July 2021) A while back, I made a list of the 1000 top-grossing movies of all time (adjusted for inflation) and I was a bit surprised to see what I’d missed even as a big Hollywood kind of viewer. While I scored an impressive percentage of those films seen (96% of the entire top-1000, 98.5% of the top-grossers since 2000), my recent misses usually were kids’ movies (which make bank but don’t get any critical attention, nor hold up all that well)… and one lone Christmas film: Four Christmases. It’s not all that surprising to find out that the film was an unseen box-office success: It’s a product of the Hollywood family holiday film production line, which means that it’s designed to pack audiences in the eight-week holiday release window and be forgotten the other ten months of the year. Back in 2008, it was a box-office success. Hard for it to be otherwise, considering that it features comedy fixtures Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon as a high-flying couple abruptly forced to spend their holidays attending no less than four Christmases (one for each of their divorced parents). You can see the structure of the film hammered in front of you: Introducing the lead couple, then creating escalating comic hijinks in four different situations and family dynamics, then resolving the various conflicts in time for a happy ending. Having a strong supporting cast means an opportunity to cast known actors in smaller, wilder roles—which gets us notables such as Robert Duvall, Jon Favreau, Mary Steenburgen, Tim McGraw, Kristin Chenoweth, Jon Voight and Sissy Spacek. But now that we’ve spent so much time talking about commercial intentions, structure and casting in an attempt to talk about the film’s effectiveness, let’s admit that the results are not up to even this most basic premise. Oh, it’s fitfully entertaining, with Vaughn and Witherspoon lending some of their accumulated comic goodwill to the results. Executed up to the standards of the Hollywood factory, it manages to create a watchable package out of a silly premise and misguided moments. But there’s a good reason why Four Christmases made money upon release and then failed to make a mark — it’s the kind of product that sells well to families looking for a movie escape during the holidays, but doesn’t interest anyone else after that.