Speaking only from a personal perspective based on the celebration of Christmas in one's lifetime, here's a very general breakdown (user experience may vary) of the holidays. As a kid, and once you're old enough to understand what's going on, it's a great thing. Family, friends and some dude named Santa bring you gifts.
But as you enter the teen years, it's no longer as cool as it once seemed, especially when clothes and other practical items replace toys and such, and family tensions (always exacerbated by related gatherings) are no longer masked by one's youth and naïveté or the adults trying to hide such problems from the kids.
Things ramp up a bit when a significant other enters the picture, as it does upon the arrival of kids and then grandkids. Yet, the time between those events sometimes end up feeling like one's just going through the motions. That is, until the remaining years are dwindling and one gets a fresh perspective on things.
As a result, some family members try to get creative and infuse those intervening holidays and accompanying rituals with a little spirit and/or spice. With that as the backdrop perspective, Alfredo De Villa comes off as the uncle who's trying to breathe some new life into the end of the year Hollywood gift -- the Christmas dramedy - with "Nothing Like the Holidays."
And that's by predominantly infusing the otherwise mostly recycled story's characters with a certain Latin flavor. Not being a connoisseur of such holidays offerings (they all end up pretty much blending into a homogenized glob clouded by a heavy layer of spiked 'nog), I can't say for certain if this is the first such pic with a majority Latino cast, but I'll through out the guess that it most likely is.
That said, and aside from some related cultural elements tossed into the mix, this is your standard Christmas get-together dramedy, written this time by Rick Najera and Alison Swan. Among the recurring elements is, of course, various family members and friends assembling for the big day and related meals, accompanied by the usual friendly and occasionally not-so-friendly jabs at one another. While the latter are open game for all, here they mostly involve the family matriarch (Elizabeth Peña) toward her non-Latina daughter-in-law (Debra Messing) and the latter's decision to put off breeding, thus shortchanging the grandchild front.
There are also various shenanigans, such as the men (including the patriarch played by Alfred Molina) getting together to accomplish some sort of task (often putting up the decorations, here it's to bring down the old and unwanted front yard tree), as well as more serious stuff.
That includes riffs in relationship (usually related to the parents, and that's the case here, with the adults kids reacting in the usual array of anger, depression and determination to make things right -- the latter falling in the lap of John Leguizamo's character) and/or a secret illness whose sole purpose is to put everything back into perspective and thus have some sort of merry and grateful Christmas.
Throw in the young adults going out drinking and partying, various heart-to-heart moments, and adversaries realizing the other side really isn't so bad after all, and you have all the fixings of a standard, holiday dramedy. That's even with the inclusion of gang-related material and one character being a war veteran -- although I'm guessing the latter sort of character can't be novel to this sub-genre as such films seemingly come out every year and thus have to have coincided with some other war in the past.
De Villa handles all of that in a competent enough way and the performances are generally good. Yet, even with the Latin flair, angle and casting, the film simply doesn't feel that different from its many predecessors. Heck, even the title is indistinguishable from most, meaning this holiday gift will likely end up forgotten in some drawer where it will be tossed with so many others of its kind. "Nothing Like the Holidays" rates as a 4.5 out of 10.
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