"'Dreck' the Halls"

Good Christmas movies are hard to come by. For every "It's a Wonderful Life," there are hundreds of holiday flicks with no heart, no inspiration and seemingly no scriptwriter — movies like "Deck the Halls."

Atrocities such as this happen every year; you may just have trouble remembering 2004's "Christmas with the Kranks" or "Surviving Christmas." To refresh your memory, both were critically panned, somewhat lucrative fall releases with big stars looking to make a buck off of the holiday spirit.

"Deck" is no better. Steve Finch (an aging Matthew Broderick), a small-town eye doctor, is the "Christmas Guy." For some terribly vague reason involving a lost childhood and a busy father, he takes utmost pleasure from being the chairman of the town's winter festival and planning his family's holiday season down to activities for each day.

That is, until he gets new neighbors in the form of manic car salesman Buddy Hall (5 foot Danny DeVito) and his improbably tall, blonde family. Finch and Hall hit it off like a grumpy cat and a bubble bath and in no time are embarking on a 90-minute quest to ruin each other's Christmases as thoroughly as possible.

To trump Finch in the ultimate Christmas showdown, Hall comes up with a brilliant plan: to string his house with enough Christmas lights to make it visible from outer space. Like Finch's backstory, Hall's motivation in this kooky endeavor is never explained beyond the fact that he can't stand the thought of being invisible. Without any context, we're left to imagine that such an inferiority complex can only stem from DeVito's noticeable tinyness.

With characters this shallow, the viewer turns hopefully to the humor of the movie to salvage the experience. Unfortunately for all, the gags, too, are woefully disappointing. The film edges disturbingly towards the depraved on several occasions, including one particularly cringe-worthy scene in which the two dads catcall three scantily-clad dancers only to discover that their own daughters are the ones up on stage.

The overwhelming number of thinly-veiled sexual jokes reveals an ill-fated attempt on the part of the filmmakers to inject some humor for the adults on top of the usual dull-witted slapstick for the kids. Far from being funny, they're cause for worry about what the MPAA is letting slip into PG-rated movies these days.

When it's not horrifying parents and confusing children with jokes about closeted cross-dressers, the script is almost surprising in its sheer mediocrity. With zingers like, "I'm the new Christmas guy! You can have Toe Jam Day!" it's no wonder the movie seems half an hour too long — despite its relative shortness.

The A-list cast does nothing to alleviate the pain. Comedy veterans Broderick and DeVito fall flat. Broderick, in particular, doesn't even seem to try to bring any life to his role. Between his lackluster performance and his graying hair, even the most loyal fan is hard-pressed to find a resemblance to the lovable Ferris Bueller of yesteryear. DeVito, meanwhile, is almost pathetically vivacious, but to no avail: The character is just too unlikable to be redeemed.

The story never steers far away from the Hollywood Christmas formula, ending with a literal lightshow of saccharine cheer and goodwill as we all learn a little something about ourselves and the true meaning of Christmas. However, the message of the movie is a hackneyed one. It beckons the child in all of us to forget the uberconsumerism of the holiday season and remember what's really important in life. This, perhaps, provides the only humor of the movie — the irony of such a moral coming from a film conceived for the sole purpose of raking in the Thanksgiving weekend cash.

So if Mom wants to see a movie for the whole family in the spirit of the season, stay far, far away from this one. You'd do better to take Grandma to "Borat" — at least then she might laugh a few times.

"Deck the Halls" (95 minutes, at area theaters) is rated PG for some crude and suggestive humor and for language.