‘Christmases’ ho-ho-hum

There are worse holiday-related ways to spend your time than “Four Christmases,” I suppose.

Making a three-hour drive to grandmother’s house in pea-soup fog, for one. Assembling a bicycle with with one of those fake little screwdrivers, for another.

Perhaps buying a pie on the day before Thanksgiving, or winding up in the emergency room for eating your mother-in-law’s macaroni salad.

But honestly, there isn’t much in this mostly cheerless comedy – starring an oddly matched Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon as a reluctant couple, both products of divorce, making the inevitable Christmas Day family pilgrimage to four households – that is worth the trouble of going to the theater and interrupting your holiday-meal digestion.

You know the drill in this story from the opening scenes (and the unrelenting and unblinking previews, which dutifully spell out pretty much the whole movie).

Brad (Vaughn) and Kate (Witherspoon), rich and carefree, blow their parents off each year at Christmas by making up some humanitarian trip they’ve committed to.

This time, however, they get caught on live TV when they’re stranded at the airport. They actually have to hunker down and endure what millions of Americans engage in every year: racing around on Christmas Day trying to fulfill all their family holiday obligations.

Each of the four households they visit is, inevitably, wildly dysfunctional.

Brad’s father (Robert Duvall) is a blustering reactionary. His mom (Sissy Spacek), has hooked up with his childhood best friend. Kate’s mother (Mary Steenburgen) is romantically involved with a fundamentalist evangelist. Her dad (Jon Voight) is a … well, I’m not sure I can even recall, at this point. Perhaps his great sin is just that he’s boring.

The point is, of course, that the hip and sophisticated Brad and Kate – dwelling in that rarefied environment of high incomes, lavish lifestyles, no children and restful holiday-morning slumbers – are missing out on something essential. Which might be valid enough if director Seth Gordon didn’t feel required to shove the sentiment down our throats.

Or maybe the point is that when you’re lucky enough to vault over your parents’ economic class and social standing, you should run when you can.

Vaughn and Witherspoon are old pros, and they gamely do what they can with the screenplay, which involves many of the expected calamities: baby vomit, revelation of traumatic childhood secrets, Neanderthal siblings, devil nieces.

At one point, Kate is forced to relive one of her biggest fears of being trapped in a birthday-party bounce house, and she tackles the task with comic relish.

Yet mostly the film comes across more irritatingly bland than amusing. There’s a huge canon of holiday disaster movies out there, and 90 percent are fresher and funnier than “Four Christmases.”

As you recover from macaroni-salad-induced food poisoning, flop on the couch and rent “Planes, Trains & Automobiles” instead.

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