A Merry Friggin’ Christmas (2014) is a unsuccessful attempt at bawdy festive comedy that, despite assembling an impressive cast, wastes them on a lifeless script. Boyd Mitchler (Joel McHale) and his family head off to spend the holidays with his misfit family, including crotchety drunk father Mitch (Robin Williams). Upon realising he’s only gone and left his son’s present at home, Boyd must embark on an awkward road trip with his dad and stowaway brother Nelson (Clark Duke) to try and get back before sunrise.
It's a film where you look at all the talent involved and feel sure you’re in for a treat. Sadly, it turns out they sprung for the fancy wrapping paper, but forgot to put a worthy present inside.
To be fair, it’s an excellent premise, but never quite delivers the laughs I’m hoping for. It’s your standard uncomfortable family Christmas gathering with this clan who don’t get along thrown together when Nelson decides to have his baby son christened on Christmas Eve. The gag is the baby isn’t even his son, he was just dumped on him by his trainwreck ex, but he decides to ‘man up’ and try to raise the kid anyway. He’s a clueless idiot who we first meet liquidising a candy bar to feed to the baby.
Williams, in one of his very last performances plays things unusually dry and straight here, not mining many laughs from the stodgy material. Mitch is a rote caricature of an old-school Republican ass, chastising Boyd for his sissy ‘macrobiotic’ diet and delighting in feeding him squirrel for Christmas dinner as a prank. Williams never really convinces as an angry old curmudgeon – he was obviously going for something different here, but I find myself longing for him to revert to his usual silly voices act.
The cast is filled with reliable comic character actors like Lauren Graham as Boyd’s wife, Wendi McLendon-Covey as his sister-in-law, married to a redneck sex-offender and Oliver Platt as a hobo Santa, but the characters bring few laughs and never feel more than broad caricatures.
The father-son enforced road trip is a neat idea, but it feels rushed and over too soon. Boyd is clearly desperate to keep the Santa myth alive for his boy and seems to put most of the troubles in his life down to one fateful night when his own dad burst his Santa bubble. All he cares about is completing the mission, so their wild night takes in speeding tickets, bizarre run-ins with Afghan squatters and an encounter with that aforementioned hobo Santa.
I do find it quite brilliant that for all Boyd’s efforts, his boy ends up thinking the gift is a bit crap and prefers the old board game his mum finds in the attic. I feel his pain – so many birthdays and Christmases I’ve had where Amelia ends up preferring the box the toy came in. Oh well.
Of course, the trip turns into an emotional voyage of discovery for the boys, allowing father and son to understand each other and mend their differences, but it all feels too contrived, too simple and over too soon.
Unlike films like Insomnia and One Hour Photo where Williams played against type, portraying complex oddballs, this one is a comedy. You expect him to have more to do than hurl half-hearted insults at his family. I start to feel depressed when I wonder if this surly, sozzled character isn’t closer to what Williams saw himself as towards his own tragic end.
Thankfully, his character does have a redemptive arc of sorts and we get a kind-of happy ending – it is a Christmas film after all. Problem is, it’s a dark comedy that never goes dark or funny enough. For a film where three family members – one of whom is Robin friggin Williams – debate how to dispose of the corpse of the Santa they just ran over, that feels criminal.
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