**_Harmless Christmas fun with Tim Allen, Jamie Lee Curtis and Dan Aykroyd_** When the Kranks’ daughter goes off to Peru after Thanksgiving, they decide to skip Christmas and spend the money on a Caribbean cruise, but their neighbors browbeat them for it. At the last minute, they decide they have to celebrate the holiday anyway, but how will their offended neighbors respond? “Christmas With the Kranks” (2004) is one of those Christmas flicks that you can just roll with and enjoy or be a Scrooge and pick apart. As far as the latter goes, what’s wrong with NOT blowing money on Christmas lights and so on? Who joins the Peace Corps to help out the world and comes back in a month? If you can ignore such questions, it’s entertaining enough and warmhearted. While everything is usually exaggerated in movies, especially ones like this, there ARE neighborhoods in which neighbors are coerced into displaying unison decorations for the holidays. The movie runs 1 hour, 39 minutes, and was shot in studios of the Los Angeles area, e.g. Downey, with second unit work done outside Chicago. GRADE: B-

Suitably amusing. With that said, <em>'Christmas with the Kranks'</em> certainly starts brighter than it ends. I found fun in the opening portion, especially with the two leads. I didn't like the ending as much, I found it too sappy and untidy. The run time is short though, so that doesn't hamper things much. Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis are enjoyable at the forefront of the film, with Dan Aykroyd joining them in that bracket with his arrival. The rest of the cast are fine. The plot isn't anything majorly fresh, but it entertained me enough. Fun film.