‘Christmas at the Kringles’ Review: Seasonal Caper Mixes Comedy and Horror, Missing the Mark on Both

The only thing rarer in the horror canon than a good holiday film is a good comedy. “Christmas at the Kringles” manages to miss the overlap in that Venn diagram by being awful on both counts: deeply cynical about the Yuletide season but also just completely unfunny. This failure all the more baffling given a cast populated by stalwart joke-makers including Ron Livingston, Rachel Bilson, Thomas Lennon, Arden Myrin, Rob Riggle, Donald Faison and David Wain, while director Kevin Lewis (“Willy’s Wonderland”) pilfers from the playbooks of better filmmakers to deliver a movie as stale and tasteless as last year’s fruitcake. Livingston (“The Flash”) plays Mark Severson, a workaholic stock trader who moves with his wife Julie (Bilson) and son Bobby (Jack Jewkes) to a small town as a band-aid to keep the family from falling apart. Arriving a week before Christmas, Mark halfheartedly tries to pull together a celebration for Bobby, but fate intervenes when the Seversons meet the Kringles, a family that celebrates the holiday year-round. When Nick Kringle (Lennon) invites them over for dinner on Christmas Eve, Mark surrenders his big-city skepticism at Julie’s request — and much to his surprise, they actually have fun. Two months later, Mark is even more immersed in work than ever, much to the disappointment of Julie, who was hoping for a proper Valentine’s Day celebration. When Nick’s wife Carol (Myrin) invites Julie and Bobby over for dinner, Mark is initially thrilled, but when he receives a warning from their neighbor Daryl (Faison) that the Kringles aren’t all they seem to be, he rushes over to check on them. When he finds that he’s locked out, he and Daryl reach out to a mall Santa (Riggle) who’s part of a network of fellow mirth-bringers; together, they have identified the Kringles as dangerous maniacs. But when Santa fails to show up at their house to back them up, Mark and Daryl are forced to go in by themselves in the hopes of rescuing Julie and Bobby before the Kringles put the entire Severson family permanently on the naughty list. Written by Zack Imbrogno, “Christmas at the Kringles” feels like it’s been cobbled together from any number of other, much better movies, in the hope that seasoned improvisers like Lennon and Riggle can make the end result coherent. After a cold-open chase scene featuring a screaming woman and a murderer in a Santa Claus suit that seems entirely uninterested in either spatial geography or visual continuity, editor Ryan Leibert seems to embrace its disjointed pacing for the rest of the film. As the main story gets under way, there’s barely enough time for Livingston, Bilson and Jewkes to deliver their expository introductions before Mark almost plows into Santa, setting an ominous tone for their move to the suburbs. Julie’s desperate desire for small-town community is drawn one-dimensionally, but in comparison to Mark, Bilson’s character is a portrait in nuance. She reveals early that they’re looking to rekindle some of the magic in their relationship, but with Mark, it’s hard to understand why she even bothers. Livingston plays him like a jaded, unhappy dick who only barely begins to develop deeper humanity as the story progresses, and even after he decides to fight for his family he is alarmingly ineffectual. Ironically, his old “Swingers” costar Vince Vaughn would have been perfect for the role — he’s always been skilled at balancing a bitter edge with more sweetness — but for context, Livingston delivers a performance here about as likable as his notoriously awful “Sex and the City” boyfriend Berger. By comparison, Lennon and Myrin play the Kringles like they’re relatives of Adam Scott’s self-important helicopter leasing agent from “Step Brothers,” heckling the sour notes in their son’s recorder playing and championing their holiday life choice with a cult member’s zeal. Lennon’s always been a comedian who commits to a bit, for better or worse, but what he delivers in unhinged wholesomeness he lacks in true menace once the danger escalates for the Seversons. Riggle, meanwhile, has played a character like this (albeit not one with Saint Nick’s pedigree) a few dozen times already, so his comic contributions are reliable if not terribly fresh. On the other hand, “Scrubs” star Faison manages to inject effective (and funny) incredulity into the final siege by Mark and Daryl on the Kringles’ house. As the shepherd of Imbrogno’s uninspired script, Lewis tries to zhuzh up the material with quick-cut montages stolen from the likes of Edgar Wright, but none of it adds up to anything meaningful, or even entertaining. The “explanation” for the Kringles’ behavior is not only dumb, but it makes little sense: Are the three children living in their house their actual kids? Is there really no recourse for worried neighbors from the cops, despite what appears to be repeated disappearances connected to them? And why the hell is there a Christmas gimp living in their home? The movie prompts many questions, but it’s so badly done, you don’t really care what the answers are. Yet the thing about horror fans, even ones expecting filmmakers to hit the bullseye between a challenging tone (comedy) and topic (holidays), is that they are notoriously forgiving — if there’s something, anything there. But to ride out the metaphor that this film invites, “Christmas at the Kringles” is like a gift-wrapped box with nothing inside. Visually obnoxious but uninventive, featuring actors giving uninspired performances as characters you don’t care to see live or die, it lacks even an ounce of the joy that its eponymous family claims is their reason for living. Well, except for when it’s over.