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Wednesday, November 24, 2004
'Kranks' can't keep the humbug spirit
In "Christmas With the Kranks," this week's movie characters who learn the true meaning of Christmas are an upper-middle-class couple who seize the opportunity of an empty nest to take a year off from the obligations and trappings of the holiday season.
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More specifically, they are Luther and Nora Krank (Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis), who, on Luther's inspiration and against Nora's better judgment, decide to spend the $6,000 they invest each year in the festivities instead on a getaway Caribbean cruise.
So they go cold turkey: no tree, no cards, no charitable contributions, no gifts exchanged with family members or co-workers, no traditional neighborhood party, no gaudy Christmas lights making their million-dollar home look like a Las Vegas casino.
And the big joke is that their lives go all to hell for it. The neighbors first pressure and then ostracize them. The local newspaper denounces them in a vicious exposé. The police abuse them. Carolers single them out for harassing serenades. And more.
The movie has many problems, chief among them being that it's not very funny. Based on a comic novel by legal-thriller king John Grisham, the gags strung on the pretty-good premise are never very inventive, clever or satirically biting.
And while Christmas-movie regular Tim Allen ("The Santa Clause," etc.) is likable and has his moments, it's weakly acted. Curtis consistently overacts her part and good character actors Cheech Marin, Dan Aykroyd and Austin Pendleton are wasted in one-beat roles.
Strangely, the screenplay makes such a good case in its first half against the holidays that it can't recover when it goes soft and has its characters suddenly embrace the wretched excesses of Christmas. Thus, the whole last half of the movie rings agonizingly false.
Above all, "Kranks" lacks that basic kernel of credibility that even a goofy farce needs to work. As those of us who don't send Christmas cards or lavishly decorate our houses or avoid holiday vacations know, the sky does not fall in.
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