23 Days of Christmas Reviews: Christmas with the Kranks

Christmas with the Kranks

Netflix synopsis: With their daughter away, the Kranks decide to skip Christmas altogether until she decides to come home, causing an uproar when they have to celebrate the holiday at the last minute.

*Gideon commentary is in red.

*Sam commentary is in black.

The rundown: Christmas with the Kranks centers around the Krank family, who are just as unlikable as moniker implies but somehow not so unlikable as their neighbors. The film opens with Papa Krank and Mama Krank dropping Daughter Krank off at the airport. Daughter Krank has taken a job overseas doing important humanitarian things, which upsets Mama Krank because that means Christmas will suck this year. We're treated to a lovely scene where Papa Krank keeps running in a store for Mama Krank in the rain, where he screws up the errand and gets soaked from head to toe. During this sequence, a dude dressed up as Santa repeatedly asks him if he needs an umbrella. It's charming. Presumably because the rain and Santa "Don't You Want an Umbrella" Claus, Papa Krank proposes skipping Christmas altogether to Mama Krank. They could go on a cruise, he says, and avoid spending all that money they spent the year before. 

Papa Krank is a fairly standard Tim Allen character. He's broadly likable and warm, but paradoxically standoffish and brusque. Think a kinder, friendly Chevy Chase. Anyway, Krank is weakly set up as a Scrooge-y Grinch. He's strangely indifferent to his daughter joining the Peace Corps and is rather irritated that his wife is grieving her absence. For no specifically explained reason, he decides to run the numbers on his family's Christmas budget from the previous years. Learning that the Kranks spend well over six thousand dollars each year, he hatches a plot to "skip Christmas" and have a private vacation with his wife. In any sane universe, the Kranks would have quietly went about this. They would have spent a minimum in cheap decorations, attended a party or two, and fly off to Florida for their cruise. After all, older couples facing the late stages of middle age have to rejuvenate every now and then, right? Unfortunately, the Kranks do not live in a sane universe.

Papa Krank goes all out on not celebrating Christmas and wants everyone to know about it. He sends a memo to everyone in his office saying he won't be celebrating the holiday and even refuses to donate to the police department's annual holiday charity. (Which is crazy because he would be donating by purchasing a calendar featuring shirtless policemen. Think of Mama Krank!) The Kranks live in a neighborhood where it's unacceptable to avoid Christmas. In this neighborhood, everyone decorates heavily for Christmas and probably gives out full-size candy bars on Halloween. They are very well off. It makes sense for them to expect the Kranks to participate, so when Papa Krank refuses to put Frosty on his roof they all go insane. Frosty is a creepy life-size waving snowman. He lights up. It's creepy. One neighbor in particular hates Papa Krank for keeping Frosty hidden away in the basement. We'll call this neighbor Grr Angry.

Grr Angry is Victor Frohmeyer, played by a disturbingly gleeful Dan Aykroyd. Frohmeyer is the self-appointed Weihnachtenführer of the neighborhood. The Kranks' willful and divisive lack of festive cheer cannot be tolerated! The other neighbors are enthralled by Frohmeyer's doughy-faced charisma. Ms. Krank in particular is terrified by Frohmeyer's ill-defined power. But Mr. Krank is determined to rekindle his relationship with his wife. He refuses to give into his cultish neighbors' harassment. Indeed, he redoubles his effort to avoid Christmas. The next three hours of screentime portray this epic struggle. The neighbors continue to engage in strange and illegal acts of pressure, the Kranks continue to flout their indifference, and Gideon continues to grind his teeth. A subplot is established in which Mr. Krank hates the terminally ill couple across the street and abuses their cat. Har har har.

Before leaving for the cruise, Papa Krank encourages Mama Krank to get a spray tan. They both do. In the middle of tanning, something goes wrong and both Mama Krank and Papa Krank end up in the lobby of the spray tanning salon. The salon is in the middle of the mall, so of course they run into their pastor. The pastor is disturbed by this and can't seem to stop looking at bikini-clad Mama Krank. After showing their goodies to their pastor, the Kranks go home and start packing for vacation. This is when Daughter Krank calls and says she has decided to come home for Christmas! And she's bringing her fiance! And she really wants some hickory honey ham at her parents' annual Christmas Eve party. What are the Kranks to do? Obviously the only choice is to confess the truth to their daughter and have a quiet Christmas Eve with her. So  of course they don't do this.

Nope! Wacky hijinks! Mr. Krank is spat upon for wanting to have a vacation with his wife. He must spend the final act grovelling and pouting as his neighbors pitch in to maintain the facade of Christmas. Ms. Krank spends several scenes trying to purchase cases of booze and a gigantic can of spam. It is very difficult. Cheech Marin, a cop (ha!), arrests Mr. Krank for carrying a tree that was given to him. If only he had bought Cheech's naked calendar! But the terrifying power of Herr Frohmeyer brings Cheech and co. to heel. The whole neighborhood puts together a smashing party. A creepy smiley dude invites himself to the shindig. Many joys are had (onscreen that is).

Then, there's an inexplicable terrifying scene at the ending. The creepy smiley guy who asked Papa Krank is he needed an umbrella earlier in the movie attends the party and seems to know everyone by name. He comes across Papa Krank as he leaves the house and implies that he is Santa Clause. Then, Papa Krank gives his cruise tickets to the couple across the street with the cat he tortures. He even offers to take care of the cat when they're gone. It's odd. He goes back to the party, makes up with Mama Krank and then for some awful reason the guy who said he was Santa earlier in the film flies across the sky saying "Ho ho ho." It is terrifying and breaks the tone of the film completely. 

He said: Christmas with the Kranks fails several important criteria for a proper Christmas film. For one, the villainous protagonist is just a milquetoast jerk barely worth booing. Krank has such vague wants, desires, and drives that it is hard to understand him. It's silly to demand dramatic complexity from a light-hearted holiday film, but that doesn't mean they have to be cardboard caricatures. Despite his prickly, nonspecific hatefulness, I couldn't really understand why the film thought the Tim Allen character was so despicable. He starts out by whining that he donated "too much" to the hospital, but he quickly rolls over and continues his yearly donation, despite the premise of "skipping it". So what's the problem? Is this a satire on the hypocritical, wasteful indulgence of Christmas festivities? "Christmas is about family and generosity, not materialism" would be a natural moral to this kind of film. Surprisingly, the film rolls out the exact opposite.

His neighbors don't care about the Kranks going through family difficulties, but it's a huge travesty that they don't have a snowman roof installation like everyone else. There's some comedy to be wrung from this premise of spooky groupthink and invasive neighbors, but the film treats the Kranks as the sinners. It's their "selfishness" and "childishness" that sets them apart from the neighbors baying and howling about them not giving them a party. The backwards morality of the film isn't the only problem. The writing is quite awful. The characters arcs make little sense, as the characters are enigmatic, impulsive beings. Why does Mr. Krank hate Christmas with such mild disdain? Why is his career going nowhere? Are the Kranks having a midlife crisis? Why is Ms. Krank having such violent mood swings? Why is Daughter Krank marrying a foreign man she's known for less than a month? How are her parents going to keep their aborted vacation a secret from her when the neighbors broke into their house to publish pictures of the "Christmas skippers" in the newspaper? There are numerous tiny subplots that come out of nowhere and return to the same place. Cheech captures a burglar before the climactic party, handcuffs him (outside in the snow!), and doesn't notice that Frohmeyer's son lets him into the house. Said burglar burgles the house and is swiftly caught. Yay. The whole film reeks of rewrites and development hell. I've not read the John Grisham novel on which the film is based, but I'd like to think that it had some kind of complexity or quality that was lost in translation. In short, this was a Christmas film that made me identify with the Grinch. Bah humbug. 

Feminism: Women look bad, but that's because this is an misanthropic film
Shoehorned Christmas Cheer: Too much
Sequel potential: The Kranks divorce, but are forced to live together and maintain a Stepford illusion
Manly sighs: Does a hateful growl count as a sigh?
Small cinematography things that bugged me: There's a camera trick where a character is in focus, then the frame fish-eye warps (like a racking focus?) to double the display. It's not very subtle and the effect is "wacky".
Candy canes: 0

She said: This is a film I had seen before, and I remembered it being much better than it actually is. I blame the nostalgia of watching Christmas movies with my mom over a cup of homemade cocoa. Unfortunately, I did not watch it with my mom or homemade cocoa, so all its flaws were on full display. Where do I start? Tim Allen's character is obnoxious but not too obnoxious; Jamie Lee Curtis' character is shrill about pretty much everything, which is unfortunate because she changes her mind about what she wants to do for Christmas every five minutes. 

I agree with Gideon on pretty much every point except for his note on feminism. Feminism is present in this film and thriving. Though Papa Krank seems to control the plan from the beginning, Mama Krank swoops in when their daughter announces she's coming home for Christmas. She calls the shots for the last third of the film. That said, she does this in a way that makes me want to bludgeon her so I don't have to hear her squeal out of nervousness anymore. I'm really upset this film didn't hold up on a rewatch, because I'm pretty sure I enjoyed it as a kid. Or did I? No, judging by that terrible scene at the end where the film becomes a fantasy, I can say I did not enjoy this then or now. I'll rate this higher than Gideon did out of pity, but that doesn't say  whole lot about the film itself.

Sappiness: Not much - mostly angry adults running around screaming about holiday traditions.

Gore level: Not nearly enough.

Cute animals: I found the neighbor's cat, who Papa Krank tortured, quite cute.

Loud kids who are supposed to be cute but are really annoying: Too many. Far too many.

Times that made me contemplate the power of nostalgia: Every second of the film but especially the end of it.

Candy canes: 1

Final score: 0.5 Candy Canes