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Published: November 27, 2008
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FOUR CHRISTMASES *½
The size difference between Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon isn't the only thing keeping them apart in "Four Christmases."
His signature rat-a-tat overconfidence and her pleasing girl-next-door perkiness turns out to be an awkward mix. Individually likable, Vaughn and Witherspoon never mesh as a couple. That's a problem, since we're meant to root for them to stick together. It doesn't help that they're saddled with hackneyed holiday gags.
Vaughn's Brad and Witherspoon's Kate are a happily unmarried couple sharing a coolly industrial-chic house in San Francisco. They like to keep things lively by role-playing at bars, as they do in the film's amusingly naughty opening, and they lie to their families about doing charity work each year to avoid seeing them during the holidays. So far, so good.
Then, when they're caught live on the news getting stuck at the airport on the way to Fiji, they get roped into seeing both sets of parents, who are divorced. And so they must celebrate - let's all say it together - four Christmases.
The visiting begins in painfully broad fashion with Brad's family, all white-trash stereotypes led by Robert Duvall. (A freakishly muscular Jon Favreau and Tim McGraw play his ultimate-fighter brothers.) The noisy joylessness of this segment sets the tone for the whole movie.
Next, they're off to see Kate's mom (Mary Steenburgen), who's found the Lord now that she's involved with a rock-star preacher (Dwight Yoakam, underused). The third stop is at Brad's mom's house, where Sissy Spacek gets to do little but beam benignly as a rich Marin County hippie. Finally, they end up at the upscale home of Kate's father (Jon Voight), but by then the couple's relationship is hanging by a thread. After attempting to offend us in every imaginable way, "Four Christmases" has the chutzpah to try tugging at our hearts, with a half-baked conflict about Kate's sudden desire to get married and start a family - as if any of their hideous visits would inspire such an instinct.
Christy Lemire,
The Associated Press
TRANSPORTER 3 **
The "Transporter" series turned Brit actor Jason Statham into a movie star. But maybe it's time to hang up his car keys. He's better than this.
"Transporter 3" finds Statham again playing Frank Martin, a driver for hire known throughout the underworld for always completing his job. This time Frank finds himself kidnapped by a sinister American (Robert Knepper) and forced to tour Europe with an exploding bracelet around his wrist. If he strays too far from his car he'll blow up.
Meanwhile he must follow instructions and try to get along with his passenger, a bratty Ukrainian redhead named Valentina (Natalya Rudakova). Valentina's papa is a bigwig in environmental protection; the bad guys have kidnapped Valentina to force him to sign a deal allowing them to bring tankers filled with radioactive waste into the country.
There are a few decent moments here - at least when director Olivier Megaton slows down the action enough that we can see some of the feats performed by the stunt drivers.
"Transporter 3's" sole reason for existing is to bask in Statham's wryly manly aura. Statham has a strong screen presence and exudes a working-class intelligence that can be affable or menacing. Wish he'd find some projects that allowed him to put those qualities to better use.
Robert W. Butler,
McClatchy Newspapers
