Let’s paint a picture—and I doubt it’s going to be that hard to envision for many of you.
It’s been a long year. Long month, long days. Out buying Christmas gifts for the kids. Someone in front of you at the store using 37 coupons and a bag of coins to pay for a Fortnite gift card. Your older brother just texted you that his kid is sick two days after they visited you, joyously, for the holidays. You become paranoid about the tickle in your throat, which you thought was just dog hair. All the dishes still aren’t done—days’ worth. All that’s left in the liquor cabinet is the dregs of some Bailey’s that you have zero reservations about chugging, calories be damned. Because, indeed—you are weary. You have done the good work of elevating the holiday spirit for all around you. But it’s time to put the kids to bed.
And, with that disgusting lukewarm Bailey’s, you decide to throw on a movie with which you’ll identify. The holidays are a grind. The romanticism is cloying. The spirit hasn’t quite stuck with you this year, and you know there are plenty of flicks available for you to watch in which characters live out your fantasies: screaming into pillows while their visiting family is downstairs; raging at the consumerist antics of presents under the tree; sneaking an extra tipple or two of gin from the liquor cabinet, or chopping a head of cabbage in half like it’s the head of everything you hate (s/o Ellen Griswold!).
It’s time to unwind with some relatably-exasperated comedies that are best fired up with the kids tucked away and pleasantly sacked by the magic you’ve made for them. They’ve had their turn. Allow yourself a spell, now.
I’ve curated a list of my five favorite Christmas movies to watch without the kids. I’ve left off many of the classics, Christmas Vacation included. The kids always seem to be around for that one, even though they don’t get the full scope of the humor. Below, however, are comedies that shade toward that rated-R threshold we all so crave when our brains and backs are figgy pudding from, well, *throws hands up and gestures to all the lights, trees, presents, joy, sugar, sugar, sugar, etc.*.
Pour yourself a tall nightcap of Christmas jeer and settle in.
Dan Johnson’s five best christmas movies to watch without the kids
5. Violent Night (2022)
This one’s too new and too gory to clock anywhere here but number-five. But it’s for the Stranger Things fans out there, and the folks who would rather get together to watch something cathartic foregrounded against the backdrop of Christmas.
The premise is, sort of, in that same amorphous area of mega-rich fall-from-grace (alternatively: get-what-they-deserve) stories, a la Succession, Billions, The Fall of the House of Usher, The White Lotus, and so many other prestige television shows have made popular in the 2020s. An uber-wealthy family gathers at their matriarch’s mansion for Christmas, each of them manipulating their way into larger chunks of the will.
It’s all interrupted when a team of mercenaries from inside the mansion (a la Bel Canto) take the family hostage at the same time as a world-weary, drunken, David-Harbour-played Santa Claus shows up to deliver presents to the mansion. Problem is, the reports of gunfire from the house within scares Santa’s reindeer away.
Santa develops a soft spot for an awfully Cindy-Loo-Hoo-esque character named Trudy, whose only wish that her family would get along inside the house. In doing so, Santa reveals to Trudy his past as Nikamund the Red, a Viking warrior (which is indeed one of the many Norse renditions of the legend of Santa Claus), and vows to save her and her family at all costs.
John Leguizamo plays the lead mercenary, and watching him and David Harbor face off is fun stuff. It’s not overly gory, and the gore is not without its own cheer.
Just picture Hopper trying to save Eleven’s Christmas, and you’ll have bought in.
4. Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (1987)
Sure, it’s about getting home for Thanksgiving. But I’d be hard-pressed to find many folks who don’t see this classic as Christmas-worthy, as well.
To be honest, I’m not sure there’s much more I can add to the conversation, here. The quality of this movie, and the dynamic between Steve Martin and John Candy, are legendary. I’ve included the trailer above, of course. A 1987 bromance if ever there was one.
But think of it this way: what more can a Red Sox fan say about Sweet Caroline, other than sing it in the eighth inning at the top of his lungs, you know?
3. A Very Sunny Christmas: An It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia Christmas Special (2010)
I nearly put George C. Scott’s A Christmas Carol here, as I really do believe that whole Dickensian framework is so poignant—greed, regrets, the simple division of time into past, present, future. Scrooge’s malaise is as much an adult problem—aren’t we all trying to hoard resources, to some degree, these days, even if they’re not financial? Even if it means selfishly needing to turn away from things we would love to care about?—as it is a deliberate three-act simplification of how to better oneself.
But then throw in The Gang from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Admittedly, this is a little niche. But I wanted to include one hour-long Christmas Special from a more R-rated television show, and this is clearly the one. Because you take five degenerates like this and give them a Dickensian runway, there’s just too much foul fun to be had.
Frank Reynolds (Danny DeVito) plays Scrooge, here, and has decided that he’s going to spend his money on Christmas gifts for himself. Not for anyone in the Gang, so underserving are they. Legitimately: these are terrible people who don’t deserve gifts. But, obviously, they’re super bummed about not getting a Ferrari or a designer bag.
So they stage a Christmas-Carol inspired campaign on Frank—Dennis, Dee, Charlie, and Mac do—that, as you can imagine, is a trippy roller-coaster of cynical nostalgia. There’s even a musical number in stop-motion, somehow, a la the Island of Misfit Toys from Rudolph.
If you want to see A Christmas Carol played out with whip-smart writing, with characters in the age of the broke, drunk, and shallow: here you are.
2. Just Friends (2005)
I like to consider this my hottest take at Christmas parties when the conversation inevitably lulls to the “So what movies have you guys watched this year?” doldrums. Just Friends is, in my opinion, undeniably a Christmas movie, and is one of my all-time favorite ones at that.
It’s a bit of a classic premise from the early-aughts: overweight high school romantic, Chris Brander (Ryan Reynolds in an absolutely knee-slapping fat suit, singing along to All-4-One in his mirror) sees graduation night as the perfect opportunity to profess his love to his best friend, Jamie Palamino (an absolutely lovely Amy Smart)—and it goes terribly wrong. Publicly friend-zoned type stuff. In front of the whole school type stuff!
So Chris curses the town, goes on to lose the weight in California, and becomes, basically, Ryan-Reynolds-as-a-music-studio-executive. He finds himself, via a series of misadventures involving a manic popstar his studio is desperate to sign (played my Anna Ferris, the movie’s MVP), back in his hometown ten years later. Where, once more, he rediscovers feelings for his old flame (flAmy?). ‘Tis the damn season, as they say.
So, sure. There’s a bit of fat-shaming some folks might not get down with these days to begin the premise, and it carries on throughout the movie. Chris’s reputation is, of course, that of the town’s “Chubby Bunny.” His old order at the diner is a towering stack of pancakes drenched in hot fudge, colorful candies, whipped cream, and a cherry.
It’s about as slapstick as Ryan Reynolds has ever gotten, I think, and it’s aided by a fantastic supporting performance from Chris Marquette, who plays his younger brother. The extremities to which his second-act courtship of Jamie fail are potentially more ridiculous than any in Christmas Vacation, and watching a young Ryan Reynolds try to navigate the chaos he’s accidentally sowing in his hometown is a top-drawer viewership experience re. reactionary comedy. Look out for the one scene in which he’s strapped in a medical sled. I replay it at least six times per rewatch.
Not to mention, a love triangle emerges with another once-hopeless-romantic from their high school—aptly named Dusty Dinkleman—who’s also become quite the smooth criminal in his later years, and adds to all the hijinks.
1. Four Christmases (2008)
You won’t swing me on this one. I need an eggnog-quart of Vince Vaughn’s light-rage-disguised-as-faux-surprise delivery as my ultimate Christmas unwind. And while I think the ending of this movie is actually fairly pitch-perfect with regards to its underlying narrative (a free-wheeling couple with no kids, uncertain if they want kids, trying to skip Christmas altogether but end up going to four parties, kids at all of them), I tend to turn it off when it gets a little serious. The first 90% of this movie is good enough.
Why? It’s a Christmas movie for fractured families, for people who feel a little bit crooked at the wrong time of year. Oh—Christmas can be difficult. Sometimes the lights and the merrymaking and the cheer are things we’re unwillingly (and, maybe, unwittingly) pitted against, more of a blizzard of forced emotion through which we have to forge than anything organically elevating. It happens, even to the best of us, even to those of us who unabashedly love this time of year more than any other. Sometimes, it’s just not our season. It’s okay. Always next year, etc. But, sure—it sucks all the same. And, most germane here, it’s not a bad plan whatsoever to have, in your back pocket, a movie that might in some way exorcise or suffocate your heart’s most noisy resistances. To wit:
And I’m not quite sure there’s a better remedy—or, at least, band aid—for that than a tall glass of Vince Vaughn. Who is the runaway star in this movie, doing little else than effortlessly quipping about children being monsters, Christian customs, geriatric sex habits, and—best of all—assuming the role of Joseph in an evangelical for-profit church rendition of the Nativity. Reese Witherspoon—whose character is more the emotional beating heart of the story—is his perfect straight counterpart, a la Jason Bateman, a bit, here. And supporting spots by Kristin Chenoweth, Jon Favreau, Tim McGraw, Robert Duval, etc., provide as much comedic entropy as you’d need for Vaughn and Witherspoon to stick-and-move their way through this earnestly-exhausted comedy.
And, while the ending may be pitch-perfect, I skip it, because it feels a little too—frankly—Christmas-is-for-children-insomuch-as-the-capitalist-system-needs-children-to-perpetuate-its-systemic-blahblahblah. But that’s just the crankiness in me. I’ll watch until the credits roll this year.
In any case, this movie is worth it alone for the physical comedy scene in which a baby vomits on Reese Witherspoon; so disgusted is Vince Vaughn that he begins to seize and dry-heave and beg her to leave the room. Perhaps Vaughn’s best body-comedy bit.
Google me, bitch.
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