The story of one crazy Christmas day in the life of Kate (Reese Witherspoon) and Brad (Vince Vaughn), Four Christmases is a movie about the holidays, family, and the ties that bind us. When Kate and Brad's flight away from their family Christmas is canceled, they are forced to spend Christmas at their four separate family households. And as they jump from one father to another mother, father, mother, what they find is that there's more to family than either of them has given credit to in a long time.

In many ways Four Christmases is like Meet the Parents, minus the CIA angle and multiplied by four. It is one of those movies that is funny in an almost painful kind of way. But where the family encounters in Meet the Parents serve to only challenge a strong relationship and in the end prove its strength, Four Christmases ends up spending more of its time revealing a weak relationship. And where a clever focus and likeable characters turn Meet the Parents' awkward situations and cringe-inducing incidents into an entertaining time, unfortunately, most of Four Christmases ends up just becoming cringe-worthy.

As Reese Witherspoon has said during interviews for the movie, part of what drew her to the role was its exploration of what it is like to be child of divorce—something that she didn't have to go through, but a reality that her children are. As we see during Kate and Brad's various Christmas day stops, that reality is one that involves getting used to step-parents, lingering animosity between divorced parents, potentially divergent worldviews and lifestyles all vying to be an example, and, well, more complex holidays. But as the day progresses, what Brad and Kate end up revealing is that the true effects of fractured families have less to do with the actual navigation of family dynamics and more with who each of them has become and who they are as a couple.

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