Imagine a year without Christmas. No crowded malls, no corny office parties, no fruitcakes, no unwanted presents. That's just what Luther and Nora Krank have in mind when they decide that, just this once, they'll skip the holiday altogether, despite the fact that they're usually the most fanatical about it. They might as well, since it won't be the same without their daughter, who's away in the tropics. They get the idea to JOIN their daughter in sunny paradise as a surprise, and thus, theirs will be the only house on Hemlock Street without a rooftop Frosty; they won't be hosting their annual Christmas Eve bash; they aren't even going to have a tree. But when their daughter surprises THEM by cutting her trip short and returning home for Christmas, there's a mad scramble to prepare themselves to have the traditional Christmas fanfare on extremely short notice.

The movie was genuinely funny but in the end it could not escape the cliché of becoming just another feel good Christmas movie. The whole idea that the movie has to have some moral and teach us something gets quite old after awhile, and I would have rather seen a drastic ending rather than everybody pulling together, that at least would have been original and new. The movie spends the entire first three quarters of the movie mocking how everyone seems to think that Christmas being celebrated is almost a law and a crime to skip to end up celebrating all these themes in the end anyways, I wonder if the irony was lost on the screen writers and producers. But I can’t fault the movie as there was several times they had me busting up in stitches from laughter as they did a very good job of mocking what Christmas has become.

Tim Allen has a comedic timing that is so much better than he ever showed in what made him famous and that was his grunting on the TV show Tool Time. He just seems to find away to give you a look of utter contempt at times for the holiday spirit and joyous celebration of not celebrating that he is hilarious in the movie. But it was Jamie Lee Curtis who stole the movie as her fear of what the neighbors thought and her genuine paranoia is downright side splitting. The movie would have been one of the better comedies has they avoided the trap of celebrating the holidays and just stuck with their contempt of what has become a retail controlled event, all the same the movie was funny and worth the laughs.
3 stars out of 5