Christmas With the Kranks

Christmas With the Kranks would love to be considered among the "twisted" holiday classics like Bad Santa and A Christmas Story, but instead finds itself resting atop a junk heap that includes Jingle All the Way and Eight Crazy Nights. By taking a saccharine sweet holiday message and coating it with total crap, it gets the twisted holiday movie formula all screwed up. A little bit of evil crap is OK, but being evil for most of a film’s running time and then trying to become It’s a Wonderful Life in the last 20 minutes results in a film that is discordant, unfunny and just plain rude. Not that Kranks is any good when it’s being evil, either. It’s pretty much a shit storm from the get go, with Tim Allen mugging to the point where his face almost falls off, and Jamie Lee Curtis delivering the most overwrought, embarrassing performance of her spotty career.