AllMovie

For a Christmas movie, there's no greater indignity than being released so early in the season (October 22nd), and grossing so little at the box office (11 million dollars), that the distributors were forced to release it on DVD in time for the very same Christmas, desperate to recoup any little bit of their investment. Such was the fate of Surviving Christmas, one of the most vulgar and unwholesome Christmas movies ever to come down the chimney, including the prior year's Bad Santa. But Bad Santa had the sense to be smartly subversive, while Surviving Christmas just doesn't have any sense at all. Ben Affleck had made some poor choices leading up to it, many involving Jennifer Lopez, but this rancid holiday abomination takes the cake. Playing the role of the rootless millionaire as a pod person on lithium, Affleck is guilty of such irritating shenanigans that he forces the audience to identify with the irredeemably grouchy Valco clan. But they are such shameless money grubbers, auctioning off their dignity for lump sums of cash, that there's no solace there either. Christina Applegate's Alicia Valco is the only character even approaching sympathetic; she gets off some funny and woefully precise lines about how ridiculous this whole enterprise is. When she's not on the screen, the movie goes from mostly intolerable to completely unwatchable. Surviving Christmas is a wretched pile-up of mean-spirited characters and set pieces, reaching its improbable low point when Catherine O'Hara, seeking to reclaim her self-esteem, paints herself up like a trollop for a crass photo shoot that ends up on the Internet. Just because things are hastily tidied up into a happy ending, doesn't mean anyone learns anything, unless it's the audience remembering to trust their instincts and steer clear of things that stink.