Deck the Halls Movie Review

While watching Deck the Halls, my wife wondered aloud when the last good Christmas movie came out. (We eventually settled on A Christmas Story in 1983.) And while there may be passable Christmas movies released since then, Deck the Halls certainly isn't one of them. It's really quite the opposite.

Poor Matthew Broderick, normally so reliable, gets sucked into the nonsense here in short order. He's Steve Finch, a small-town optometrist and generally good guy, but when Buddy Hall (Danny DeVito), a car salesman, comes to town, his world is quickly upended. Buddy decides he won't rest until his home is visible from space, so he sets out to prove his non-loserness by setting up an absurdly elaborate light show on his house across the street from Steve. This thrills the locals but annoys Steve, and a rivalry develops in typical movie fashion. Steve tries to knock out Buddy's power with fireworks. Buddy responds by adding a blaring audio track to the light show.

You see where this is headed, right?

Never mind that you can see a small car from space, the blatant obviousness of that plot point is almost irrelevant. That's because the rest of Deck the Halls is so banal and pat that I promise you won't care. Gosh, do you think when Buddy and Steve cat-call "Who's your daddy!?" to the "Santa babies" at the local Christmas show they'll turn out to be their respective daughters? Think Steve will burn down his own Christmas tree with those fireworks? I assure you, Deck the Halls won't surprise you at any point during its running time.

Kudos to Broderick for giving it his all as he gamely plays along, but really, he should have known better when he got a glipse of the script. You can smell the camel dung coming from a mile away.

DVD extras include some making-of featurettes. (Yes, they really did light up a house like that.)