Four Christmases: Quadruple the angst

Happy Christmas! That's right, the Halloween films have been and gone in the blink of an eye, and now it's time for holiday films already. Now that you have had your guts churned by the terror, it is time to pluck your heartstrings with the candy canes of happiness, until you, too, realise the importance of family and how the spirit of Christmas is more vital than any gift you could give. Like Every Other Christmas Film Ever Created.

That might not be true, of course; this might be a completely different kind of Christmas film. So what might we expect from it, judging by the trailer alone?

00.16: "Every year Brad and Kate spend the holidays avoiding their families," says Mr Generically-Cheesy Voiceover Guy, after we see Reese Witherspoon and Vince Vaughn phoning around their families making convincing-sounding feeble excuses and heading off to the airport.

00.25: Where they are completely flummoxed. "Do you have a sister airline?" They ask the kind of hapless employee that airlines employ for precisely this sort of occasion. "A cousin airline? What about an airline your airline felt up once at a party?" But it is no good. Every flight is apparently cancelled by fog. They are interviewed on the local news about this, and immediately get phoned by all their immediate family (and as any offspring of divorced parents out there knows - and you're a key demographic for this film, thanks for coming - you can get up to four of those, with extra kids all round if you're especially lucky) who have seen them on the news.

Oh no. They will now not be able to avoid any family at all over Christmas. Well, welcome to our world, we say, suck it up. (That is what we are meant to say, I think, that is what the trailer is preparing us for.) And so ...

00.54: "We just need to get through these four Christmases as quickly and as painlessly as possible," says Vaughan. Summing up precisely what we all know isn't going to happen in this film, let alone the trailer.

1.10: At Brad's house, Kate is meeting his family, seemingly for the first time - his brothers are Neanderthals and his dad is a rump-thumpin' misogynist, we are to believe.

Interestingly, this part of the trailer has also been pulled out to use as a separate little trailer on its own. It's a bit that showcases the slapstick, comedy-wrestling, euphemism-tastic ho-ho Vince Vaughn type of humour that the male demographic might actually pay to come and watch.

Around 1.15: You meet Brad's mother, and her boyfriend, who turns out to be a good friend of Brad's and ... well, that's awkward. But really, what isn't awkward. It's like saying, "There's this bit, but no, that's cliched and ..." No, hang on, it's all cliched.

It's like watching Meet the Parents and Meet the Fockers back to back, twice, to make four awkward on/off-funny family collision moments into one film.

1:22: It's worth pausing it at 1.22 just to examine for one short moment the disparity in size between the players in this scene. If we imagine that Mary Steenburgen is a reasonably normal-sized human being - which, at 5'8", she actually is, so we don't have to imagine very hard - he still looks like she's attending a children's party in the court of King-Giant Vince, and Reese and Kristin Chenoweth (5' and 4'11" respectively) are like the tiny perfect dolls she has brought with her to play with at the party.

And that's it, basically.

Seriously, there's more to it, but, putting ourselves in the position of the average Jo/Joe sitting in a cinema, who wouldn't think of going and topping up the popcorn or of taking the opportunity to empty their downstairs plumbing one more time before the actual film starts?

And if they don't they can witness a baby being sick on tiny Reese and then Vince threatening to be pukey straight after. There is also a bit where Reese looks enchanted with a tiny east-Asian baby. And another baby. We can basically imagine that by the end of the movie perhaps babies will be a bit of an issue, where maybe the tiny blonde lady wants to marry so that one can fall out of her undercarriage and the giant mumbling man won't because ... well, he's Vince Vaughn and he and all the characters he plays are allergic to commitment. And they're not for a second letting on they cannot stand each other really (reportedly).

And then, by the end of the film - and we don't see this in the trailer, of course - I bet they all end up married and realise that family and children were the point of Christmas after all. With, what, a Three Years Later shot? And some more adopted Chinese babies?

I don't know, I haven't seen it, but I'm willing to bet on some or all of that previous paragraph - something seasonal, perhaps. I'll bet you all a glass of eggnog that I'm right. And let's face it, I am.