Dreck the Halls
by Michael HoffmanWednesday, November 22nd, 2006
As long as there has been film, there have been film reviews. When I was younger, Tom Shales wrote for the Washington Post (on film, not TV) and he could be brutal, which I loved. Stephen Hunter from the Post is not too shabby in his review of “Deck the Halls” the latest Christmas crap to be pushed on us. Here’s a sample:
So anyway, “Dreck the Halls” . . . ” Deck the Halls” watches as the two men go all territorial on the Christmas zeitgeist, with the vicious little rodent Broderick calling in the cops, while the bloated if tiny psychopath DeVito keeps upping the wattage. Whenever the director, John Whitesell, doesn’t know what to do, he throws in some absurdist action sequence, such as a runaway sleigh pulled by 145-year-old horses that yank Broderick through downtown where he wrecks all the Christmas finery without hurting anyone.
Now, if the movie had any guts at all, it would end up with Broderick and DeVito dead on the front lawn, one having pushed a bayonet into the guts of the other one just as the second brought the baseball bat down on the first one’s skull. Okay? That’s the internal logic of the picture. Do you think they go there? Or do you think they both see the Error in Their Ways and darn it all, become friends in the end to the tune of cash registers doing a ka-ching ode to joy?
I literally didn’t count a single laugh in the whole aimless schlep, except for the hustlers who made it, on their way to the bank.
Read more at WashingtonPost.com
