Four Christmases

IT'S NEARLY Christmas. It's time to make room round your hearth for a jolly fat man. Hello, Vince Vaughn! Have a mince pie and a vat of mulled wine.

Vaughn is not, to be accurate, particularly jolly, but he has been piling on the pounds recently and, weirdly, somebody has decided that he is this decade's Mr Christmas. Indeed, we haven't seen the tall fellow on screen since last year's useless Fred Claus.

I guess it makes sense. Deadbeat dads - the kind of cartoon-hating parents who made Nanny McPheesuch a hit - need somewhere to go with their estranged children on Saturday afternoons, and deadbeat dads just loveVince Vaughn.

As it happens, Four Christmasis not really a family film. It's not for children. Actually, it's not for mums and dads either. Or aunts and uncles. It's for blithering idiots.

Borrowing some plot details from the even-more-dreadful Christmas with the Kranks, Four Christmasesintroduces us to an incompatibly sized couple (tiny Witherspoon, gargantuan Vaughn) with firm, reasonably expressed opinions on the wretchedness of Christmas and the redundancy of marriage. You wouldn't think that a few days spent groaning at divorced parents' jokes while wringing their nieces' vomit from ruined mufflers would change their minds, but such is the peculiar magic of the useless Christmas movie.

To be fair, the bafflingly stellar cast (five Oscar winners, would you believe?) manage to extract some broad humour from the risible script. Robert Duvall is suitably gritty as Vaughn's hillbilly dad, and Mary Steenburgen nicely daffy as Witherspoon's happy- clappy Mum. But, as an argument for the virtues of romantic commitment and the deliciousness of a traditional Christmas, the film makes no sense whatsoever.

Still, it should keep deadbeat dads out of the cold for an hour or so.

Directed by Seth Gordon. Starring Vince Vaughn, Reese Witherspoon, Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Jon Voight, Jon Favreau, Mary Steenburgen, Dwight Yoakam, Tim McGraw, Kristin Chenoweth, Katy Nixon, Colleen Camp 12A cert, gen release, 82 min **