Grade: C+

Verdict: Deck the halls with suburban folly.

By BOB TOWNSEND
Cox News Service

Damning it with faint praise, "Christmas With the Kranks" is the kind of movie anyone's mother would call "cute."

It has that sappy quality de rigueur in holiday entertainment. And as a fable of alienation and redemption, it loosely follows classics like "A Christmas Carol" and "It's a Wonderful Life." But as a contemporary comedy drama set in suburban Chicago -- a setting it uses to both mock and make use of the pervasive conformity and consumerism of our day -- it's more about being timely than timeless.

Tim Allen, who seems to have made a career of starring in odd Christmas movies, such as "The Santa Clause," plays Luther Krank, a gloomy Gus stuck in the malaise of midlife. Jamie Lee Curtis, who continues to age luminously, plays Nora Krank, Luther's chipper, long-suffering wife.

On the day after Thanksgiving, the Kranks put their daughter Blair (Julie Gonzalo) on a plane to Peru (where she'll serve in the Peace Corps), then spend the drive back home tearfully wondering how they will ever survive the holidays without their only child.

The oft-repeated answer is "Skipping Christmas" -- the title of the John Grisham novel upon which writer-producer Chris Columbus ("Home Alone") based "Christmas With the Kranks." Instead of giving gifts, sending cards and hosting their annual Christmas Eve party, the Kranks decide to take a 10-day Caribbean cruise. But that doesn't go over with their friends and neighbors, who come to regard the Kranks as real Scrooges.

Sarcastic neighborhood busybody Vic Frohmeyer, played by jowly, balding Dan Akroyd, leads the fight to make the Kranks repent. And until the one late plot twist, the Kranks' unorthodox struggle not to succumb to the Christmas spirit stretches to take up the greater part of the picture.

To their credit, Allen and Curtis are very good together, evincing the easy chemistry of a middle-aged couple who both look and act their age. One of the silliest scenes has Curtis in a bikini and Allen in a Speedo, as they stagger about in a tanning salon. And after he supposedly gets a Botox injection, Allen's petrified beet face is quite hilarious to behold.

But given the tinsel-thin storyline, the typical seasonal gags — including a frozen cat, an exploding canned ham, a spate of slippery sidewalk pratfalls and an ongoing bit about a giant plastic Frosty the Snowman — only elicit perfunctory laughter. And like the dead grass in the Kranks' front yard, the first hour of the movie is conspicuously lifeless — a slushy stall before the snow flies and turns the world into the expected winter wonderland of charity and good will.