Plot: When Jesse gets dumped right before the holidays by her boyfriend Shawn, his parents convince her to still spend Christmas with them, and Shawn’s handsome cousin, while Shawn is away.
Review: There are three types of people during the holidays: the die-hards who love everything and anything Christmas, the people who are wholly and unabashedly against anything Yuletide, and Hallmark fans. The greeting card company turned television network has churned out romantic and feel-good movies set during the Christmas season for years with their primary competition, Lifetime, doing much of the same. For the most part, these movies are painfully happy and cliche, populated by small screen stars and bygone performers looking for a last-ditch chance at relevance. With so many of these movies made every year, the bar is set very, very low which means you get porn-level acting and production values to go along with fantastically formulaic stories about exes falling in love, lonely hearts finding their dream partner, and all with an unhealthy dose of Christmas cheer. Christmas with the Campbells follows that same formula and is chock full of holiday energy but with a profane parody at its core.
Christmas with the Campbells takes all of the expected elements of Lifetime and Hallmark movies are removes the filter from the characters while keeping the visual style of any movie you may come across on either network. Written by holiday movie veteran scribe Barbara Kymlicka, Christmas with the Campbells also is written by American Vandal writer Dan Lagan and Fred Claus himself, Vince Vaughn. Directed by Claire Niederpruem, this movie follows all of the beats of familiar romantic Christmas films to the point that, if you didn’t know this was a spoof, you would roll your eyes at the awful acting and cheap look of everything on screen. But, that is the entire point of Christmas with the Campbells, which takes the ridiculous tradition of these movies and makes them even more ridiculous by adding dick jokes and characters talking about the least romantic elements of sex.
Brittany Snow, fresh off of her great turn in X, plays Jesse. An aspiring amateur photographer and devoted Christmas aficionado, Jesse is dumped by her egotistical boyfriend Shawn (Alex Moffat) just days before December 25th. Sad and alone, Jesse is still invited to spend the holiday with Shawn’s parents (Julia Duffy and George Wendt), a couple who do everything from bake cookies and decorate to drink sizzurp and have lots of sex. While staying with her ex-boyfriend’s parents, Jesse meets Shawn’s cousin David (Justin Long), a rugged and outdoorsy type who is the complete opposite of Shawn. Instantly, there is a connection between Jesse and Shawn which is complicated when Shawn suddenly shows up and throws a wrench into the works. Of course, the love triangle deepens with the amorous childhood friend (Joanne Garcia Swisher) and countless nosy neighbors gumming up the works.
All of the will-they/won’t-they energy culminates with misunderstandings and confusion leading to admissions and romantic intentions and all sorts of cheesy revelations that result in happy endings for all. Just like the movies that inspired it, Christmas with the Campbells cannot help but actually follow the formulaic structure of this story. What it tries to do to set itself apart is add in boners, double-entendres, and unexpected jokes involving huffing paint and BDSM. The jokes wear thin pretty quickly as the narrative cannot help but exist within the cliche structure and becomes a cliche itself. No matter what happens or what jokes they try to force through, the intentionally overacted performances end up making the movie feel weaker than if it had just been delivered honestly.
Produced by Vince Vaughn alongside his collaborator and A Christmas Story actor Peter Billingsley, Christmas with the Campbells employs countless veterans of Hallmark and Lifetime productions. The music from Tommy Fields is exceptionally generic and the cinematography from Kristoffer Carrillo is reliably bland. I am not sure if everyone involved with this movie thought that this would be funnier than it is, because the humor feels barely above a Saturday Night Live sketch. In fact, this movie feels quite a bit like an overlong SNL bit that feels far too long when presented as a feature film. While Long and Snow do have some convincing chemistry, they are also the few who feel truly natural in their roles. Alex Moffat is far too broad for his role while Julia Duffy and George Wendt could have been ripped right from any real Hallmark film.
Christmas with the Campbells is a Hallmark movie that is trying not to be a Hallmark movie but ends up still being one. Sure, there are boners and profanity peppered throughout, but the final act of the film is an authentic and feel-good holiday treat that doesn’t stick to the intention of the rest of the movie. Christmas with the Campbells needed to be twice as ridiculous to work. As it is, this is a movie that is not bad enough to be enjoyed as a bad film nor is it good enough to be the parody it set out to be. Maybe Christmas fans will enjoy it for what it is, but overall it is an underwhelming attempt that falls short.