Ho-Ho-Hokey! 'Four Christmases' Hardly Laughing All the Way

"Four Christmases," which is several maraschino cherries short of a fruitcake, has a refreshing point to make about family: If you don't like yours, ignore it. When the holidays arrive, lie to your parents. Tell them you're inoculating children in Burma, so, whoops, looks as though you'll miss Christmas again this year.

The movie sticks with this family-unfriendly notion till the very end, but any whiff of delectable domestic comedy is overwhelmed by the scene in which a toddler sticks a used pregnancy test in her mouth, and the scene in which country singer Tim McGraw cage-fights Vince Vaughn. There's a good movie buried in "Four Christmases," underneath the layers of baloney and ham, but we never get much of a taste.

Reese Witherspoon and Vaughn play San Francisco lovebirds who avoid Christmas with all four of their divorced parents by planning vacations disguised as volunteer expeditions. This year it's "Burma" (i.e., Fiji). But a thick fog grounds all the flights, and they are ambushed by a television crew that is interviewing passengers about the delays. Their parents see the interview, naturally, and start calling.

Before Christmas day is out, the pair must make four separate stops, one for each divorced parent, all of whom live within easy driving distance of the city -- contrived, yes, but promising from a comedy standpoint. Vaughn and Witherspoon, both peppy and likable, have before them four scenarios in which to preen and riff and jab and yuk-yuk. And get a load of their parents:

Robert Duvall, Oscar winner.

Mary Steenburgen, Oscar winner.

Sissy Spacek, Oscar winner.

Jon Voight, Oscar winner.

Hardware aside, they are able comedians. (Ever see Voight in "Anaconda"? Dy-no-mite.) Unfortunately, these actors are nothing but fancy window dressing in "Four Christmases," which rushes from scene to scene before bad gags have time to land their bad punch lines.

Duvall, as a beer-drinking blue-collar coot, takes a back seat to Vaughn's cage-fighting brothers. Steenburgen, as a born-again-Christian cougar, is sidelined by a weird sequence in which Vaughn and Witherspoon participate in a live Nativity scene at her church. Spacek and Voight have a bit more to do: She gamely mugs through a sexually charged board game, and he delivers the movie's moral. But her age is clearly the joke (she's married to Vaughn's former best friend, at least 20 years her junior), and he comes across as a confused old man who has wandered onto the film set, still reciting lines from the Arthur Miller play he did in summer stock five decades ago.

The only laughs come from Vaughn, a master of ingratiation. Here, as in many of his recent movies, he tap-dances over some pretty shoddy material, goosing lines with his halting, charming delivery, a device he's honed for more than a decade now -- from his Skinny Phase (during which he made enjoyable, adventurous movies such as "Swingers," the "Psycho" remake and "The Cell") through his Fat Phase (during which he chooses projects with the drunken recklessness of a tenured professor).

Witherspoon is no Roz Russell or Gracie Allen or Lucille Ball, but she fills space nicely. And she provides the movie's faint emotional heartbeat, courtesy of her character's ticking biological clock. Both Vaughn's and Witherspoon's characters have always regarded the family unit as corrupt, anxiety-inducing and doomed, yet the question still arises: Do they want to start their own? Maybe.

But we can conclude from "Four Christmases" that their family would remain nuclear. Their child would spend Christmases not at Grandpa and Grandma's house, but on islands in the South Pacific. Which, come to think of it, is where we'd rather be than writing about this movie.

Four Christmases (82 minutes, at area theaters) is rated PG-13 for sexual humor and language.