Director: Tristram Shapeero
Cast: Joel McHale, Lauren Graham, Clark Duke, Robin Williams

No matter how good you think you work or do other things in your life, there is almost a certainty that someone thinks you are a less than desirable person. But I am also sure that how kindly you might try to act or think, there are some people who you wish would get their just desserts. For example, when it comes to the world of politics, I am sure that everybody in and out of politics has a list of politicians that irritate them to no end. (Especially that guy... you know who I am talking about, right?) But there are other career fields that contain many participants that both outsiders and insiders to the specific industry find to be very irritating. One of those career fields is show business. Let me give you an example of one person in show business that has irked me considerably for years. That person is John Kricfalusi, better know to the public as simply "John K." I know I will get a lot of heat from some readers about what I am going to say, but I feel all the same I should say it: I can't stand any of the TV shows and other animated works he has created, such as Ren & Stimpy. Sorry, but I find his art style for that animated show (and his other animated works) to be so twisted to the eye, they go beyond being creative and different, and end up being incredibly grotesque to the eye. And the humor on the shows, ranging from toilet gags to violent slapstick, are so sledgehammeringly unsubtle that I haven't laughed once at them. But it's not just his animated works that I find irritating about "John K.", but also what the man has done behind the scenes. For example, years ago in an animation magazine, he once wrote (using a pseudonym) a long trashing of the funny animated show Animaniacs, topping off his bile-filled rant by admitting that he hadn't even watched the show. So you might understand why I got a serious case of schadenfreude when in 2018 some very embarrassing revelations came out in the press concerning him, which promptly killed what remained of his animation career after years of greatly irritating various network executives and studios enough to eventually make him persona non grata in the animation industry. (Maybe he knew from the beginning his deep secrets would be found out, which would explain why he marketed a shortened surname to the public.)

While there are a few other directors that may bring out in other members of the public the same level of loathing I have for John K., and there are certainly some other show business roles that have participants that irritate some members of the public, I think the show business role that has the most irritating representatives is the acting profession. That's probably because actors are more in the public eye than directors, producers and other key show business roles. I think anyone who watches movies has at least one actor that they hate. Years ago, I got my father a copy of the Jake Gyllenhaal movie Nightcrawler, and my father told me in no uncertain terms after watching it that Gyllenhaal's performance irritated him so much that he was reluctant to watch another of his movies. As for me, there are definitely some actors whose movies I try to avoid because these actors keep rubbing me the wrong way. One actor whose work for a long time I've generally tried to avoid is Robin Williams. Before I get into him, I want to state that part of me is reluctant to put down the dead, at least one who passed away in very horrific and tragic circumstances. But even with that in mind, I still simply have to admit that Williams for the most part never attracted me to a significant degree. Yes, he was very affable away from the camera or microphone, and he definitely was talented, but I almost always found that he used his talents in a way that seemed a great misuse of what he had. Since I first saw him in Mork & Mindy, he always seemed in my eyes to express himself in a strident "Lookit me!" manner that you would associate a three-year-old child who was trying to impress his parents with some sort of unspectacular and low key stunt.

Yes, I know that later in his career, Williams did tackle some serious roles in serious dramas. Though I admit he was slightly more bearable in those movies than in his comedies, there always still seemed in my viewpoint to be some sort of air around him that you'd associate with someone showing off - lookit me, I can do drama too. (But I will admit that I thought Williams was very good in One Hour Photo, certainly more convincing than had first choice Jack Nicholson accepted the role.) When Williams was at the peak of his career, I always wished I could bump into him on the street so I could ask him, "Hey, why don't you ever want to talk about your motion picture debut in the 1977 softcore porn movie Can I Do It 'Till I Need Glasses?" But years have passed since then, and when I recently came across the Williams movie A Merry Friggin' Christmas, my mood towards Williams had softened. Perhaps in the years since I had last watched Williams in action, his performance style had matured for my tastes. The fact that reports stated that Williams wasn't as up front and center in this movie than in other of his movies was the final push to get me to watch it. The central character of the movie is played by actor Joel McHale (Community), who is a man named Boyd Mitchler who is the father of a young son (Pierce Gagnon, Looper) by the name of Douglas. Boyd is somewhat estranged from his father Mitch ("Mitch Mitchler"... ha ha ha... who is played by Williams), in part due to the fact that when Boyd was very young, his drunken and irresponsible father Mitch shattered him by telling him that there was no Santa Claus and life wasn't the least bit magical. So Boyd years later is trying to do better for his son Douglas by telling him that Santa Claus does exist. Circumstances eventually have Boyd, with his wife (Lauren Graham, Gilmore Girls) and their son Douglas, reunited with his father Mitch, his mother (Candice Bergen, The Hunting Party) and other dysfunctional family members for the upcoming Christmas holiday. That's bad enough, but Boyd gets into a panic when he suddenly realizes he forgot to bring the Christmas presents he was going to give to Douglas. Since Boyd doesn't yet want Douglas to realize that Santa does not exist, what follows is Boyd going out on the road to get back the presents in time for Christmas Day, with his father Mitch eventually accompanying him. Needless to say, the journey ahead soon becomes more of an enormous load than Santa's sack of toys.

Of all the adult performers in A Merry Friggin' Christmas, the best performer (and the only one to stay relatively intact throughout) is Candice Bergen. She made the good decision to stay pretty straight through all her scenes, and her professional attitude towards any situation she's in does more for the movie that the movie does for her and her career. The rest of the adult cast members (the child actors do an adequate job, in case you are wondering) don't fare as well overall. You are probably most interested in Robin Williams, so I will get to him first. Thankfully, Williams in this movie is more restrained than in other movies in his career, comic or dramatic. There are a few scenes where he uses a low-key approach that works well, such as when he sees a doctored family photograph in Boyd's house. But there are also times where he seems to be channelling Archie Bunker and acting like a lout (he even smokes a cigar and sits in a Bunker-like chair in one scene.) However, Williams isn't able in these scenes to show enough of a comic spark that would make the audience laugh at stuff like this. He comes across as being distracted by some other issue in his mind, resulting in the feeling that Williams is just extremely tired and is instead just going through the motions. Joel McHale, on the other hand, does seem more willing to try and generate some interest in his character, but it's not enough. He does have a sweet attitude when he interacts with his character's young son, I admit. And while his character manages to switch between a rose-colored viewpoint and one of sheer anger pretty easily and believably, for the most part his character's attitude towards almost anything comes very close to being sheer naiveté. As a result, this character becomes kind of irritating, enough that you want to give him a quick slap in the face and right afterwards give him a strong lecture about how a mature human adult should be behaving.

From what I have just told you about the performances of the two central actors in A Merry Friggin' Christmas, you might understand why in part when their two characters are interacting, there isn't much of a spark, comic or otherwise. Actually, a lot of this blame falls more on the screenplay instead of the two actors. Curiously, the movie most of the time seems to be purposely avoiding any chance for the estranged father and son from deeply interacting. When Mitch comes to pick up Boyd after he has a breakdown while driving home to get his son's present, Boyd is clearly not happy about this. But after a few words are exchanged, soon they are on their way and things are temporarily forgotten. And in the inevitable later scene when the two finally blow up and start spewing heated words, a few seconds later they are hugging and forgiving, and everything is forgotten. In fact, there are other scenes where screenwriter Phil Johnson (Wreck-It Ralph) - who wrote this movie under a pseudonym, by the way - is afraid to explore what characters are feeling and thinking. The opening scene where a child Boyd is told by Mitch that Santa does not exist refuses to let us know what child Boyd is thinking at that moment. There are a few nice dramatic moments here and there - Boyd talking to a man in Santa gear in a gas station washroom, Boyd telling his wife that he wants their son to believe in magic for as long as possible - but these good scenes are throwaway moments that don't really influence the main narrative, if at all. There are other scripting missteps, ranging from details that are never explained such as why the characters suddenly decide they can't drive their truck anymore, to setups that make instantly and painfully clear what will eventually happen, such as when characters at the beginning of the movie comment that so far there has been no snow so far this Christmas. Another sign that there's not enough substance in this story is that the movie only runs about 73 minutes before the closing credits, and the closing credits sequence is extended to run an additional 7 minutes or so.

The biggest problem with the screenplay, however, is that is just isn't all that funny. There are a handful of gags (my favorite being when Mitch is in church and is trying to sing) that are slightly amusing, but these are all throwaway moments, not coming from the characters as they are struggling with the crisis. All the other attempts at humor fall pretty flat. I think one problem is that the movie seems afraid of getting really wild. While the movie got an PG-13 rating from the MPAA, that seems a bit harsh; I saw very little that was possibly objectionable during the entire running time. (The movie got a PG rating in Canada, by the way.) I did, however, see a number of desperate attempts to get laughs. Many of them center around Mitch, who knows what Santa wants instead of milk and cookies (booze, of course), and has a port-a-potty business, meaning of course he drives in a truck full of port-a-potties. (It's usually a sign of desperation when a screenwriter inserts into a screenplay gags about toilets and/or their contents - see my reviews of Bunny O'Hare and Flush for proof of this.) Mitch also has a shotgun loaded close at hand as well as a fire extinguisher, and the gags that come with those props are as forced as you can possibly imagine. But director Tristram Shapeero does his share to make A Merry Friggin' Christmas pretty unfunny, such as making dinner table arguments sad to witness instead of being wacky, gags that go on past the breaking point and also serve no purpose, and comic crises that are suddenly resolved early on and save the characters from being pulled further and further into complicated but hilarious sitiuations and actions. About all that's positive to say about his direction is that technically things are fairly sound despite the low budget. To sum up, A Merry Friggin' Christmas is pretty friggin' bad, and may make Williams fans wish they were watching Can I Do It 'Til I Need Glasses? instead as a way of honoring their idol.

(Posted November 20, 2022)