This movie concerns a man who gets tricked into visiting his parents for Christmas. Joel McHale plays Boyd, a man obsessed with giving his children the perfect holiday season year after year to make up for the horrible ones he experienced with his abrasive father (Robin Williams). Now he hopes to shield his son from the truth about Santa, but hours after arriving at his parents', he realizes that he and his wife have forgotten his son's gifts at home in Chicago. He embarks on an all-nighter to get them to his son in time for Christmas morning.
This family is slightly more bizarre than the average, although they are charicatures of people we all know and begrudgingly love. There is the excessively macho father who tries to toughen his loved-ones up at every turn (Williams), the sweetly suffering wife (Candice Bergen), the PTSD soldier who came home to find his wife has left him with her love child (Clark Duke), the trashy sister and her red-neck husband (Wendi McLendon-Covey & Tim Heidecker); these characters add humor to the already zany journey-story. Of course there is pathos, emphasized by the death of Williams this year. Part Bad Santa and part The Family Stone, this film has something for everyone.
I am not sure why this movie gets such bad reviews on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes. I recommend it to anyone looking for a good laugh and something new to watch this Christmas.
No comments:
Post a Comment