A Merry Friggin' Christmas

Robin Williams. Joel McHale. Candice Bergen. Lauren Graham. Clark Duke. Solid comic actors up and down, and two certified legends. You put them in the same movie and what do you get? Well, if you shackle the movie with a PG-13 rating and the trappings of a Christmas movie, a barely tolerable 85 minute piece of background noise. It should sound like a winning premise: Williams is a rough, blue collar, irascible curmudgeon. Bergen is his put-upon wife. McHale is their successful family man son, the oldest of three siblings. McHale has avoided his family for a very long time, but has to visit them when his younger brother (Duke) asks McHale to be his child's godfather and attend the baptism on Christmas Eve. How will McHale deal with seeing his dad for the first time in years? A fine set-up, right? Now, here's how it actually plays out: Duke exists to get everyone together, and then becomes wholly irrelevant to the plot. The younger sister is there so her kids interact with McHale's & Graham's kids. That's it. She has no arc of her own. Nor does her husband, who is the subject of a running joke about being on a sex offender's registry because he exposed himself to a bus of senior citizens. Moving on. Lauren Graham is in this movie. She plays a wife. Does she have a name? Maybe. Candice Bergen is also in this movie. She lives in denial about her family and avoids confrontation whenever possible. McHale is uptight. Williams is an absuive dick. At no point does Williams earn his third act redemption. He just sees McHale has cut him out of a family picture and feels sad. McHale never tries to communicate. He just yells like his dad does. After the first fifteen minutes, Clark Duke is a white noise machine, which is more than Lauren Graham, who could be recast with a lamp with minimal impact. Bergen is not only similarly wasted, but she doesn't even get to have a cool telling-off-her-husband moment. I'd say nothing is paid off here, but that would be a lie, because so minimal investment is made in the script, directing, characterization, score, or cinematography, it's impossible to get a return on an investment of nothing. Literally the only thing saving this movie at all is the cast. Williams on cash-checking auto-pilot still has more energy than most people. And McHale is the perfect person to cast as the type-A over-compensating dad who has to make everything perfect for his kids to make up for the rotten childhood he had. But any time the movie moves away from them, momentum dies, and even when it's on them, the material is just so obvious and lazy. And that ties back to the two elements that handcuff this dream team of comedic actors the most: the rating and the setting. By making this Christmas, it's really hard to go where this movie wants, nay needs, to be, which is hard R territory. Without the holiday trappings, and without that stupid PG-13 rating, this movie could be like The War Of The Roses, but with a father-son dynamic instead of husband-wife. But because of that, it has to tiptoe around and take jabs, instead of plant its feet and throw haymakers. Maybe you think it's unfair to judge a movie on what it isn't rather than what it is, and sometimes, that's fair. But you don't assemble a Voltron of a cast like this and be satisfied with the bare minimum. You don't hire Gordon Ramsey to work in an Applebee's. This movie is like getting Jimi Hendrix, Eddie Vedder, John Bonham, Les Claypool, and Dave Gilmour to make a super-ground, and ask them to cover Nickelback songs. It might sound okay, but that's all it'll be, and you know they're capable of more.