Grounded

It's never easy reviewing so-called 'family films'. No critic can speak on behalf of adults and children of all ages. Apparently it's not easy to make them, either, because the ratio of hits to misses is hardly encouraging. Throw in the constraints of making a Christmas movie and the odds of something worthwhile emerging are slim.

My idea of a good festive family film would be Gremlins or The Ref, but I know some people prefer watching Macaulay Culkin throw heavy objects at Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern. Still others like seeing Bruce Willis get heavy with terrorists in Die Hard and Die Hard 2. I don't know what it is about Christmas that brings out these violent tendencies, but there you have it.

By coincidence or design, Grounded takes an idea or two from Home Alone and the snowbound airport setting from Die Hard 2 and puts them together. What it doesn't do is bother to think up much of a motor to drive the story forward.

Maybe there is a spot of Breakfast Club here too - at any rate, the spirit of John Hughes is definitely the presiding influence. Spencer (Dyllan Christopher) and his kid sister are traveling to spend the holiday season with their dad when a massive blizzard strands them in Chicago airport on Christmas Eve. They're not alone: dozens of divorced kids are marooned in a grim concrete bunker while the airport chief, Oliver Porter - a Scrooge-like Lewis Black - figures out what to do with them.

Spencer, Grace, Donna, Charlie and Timothy break out for some spontaneous but irresponsible hi-jinks, thus missing the bus to the nearest Travel Lodge and making a firm foe in Porter, who devotes the rest of the movie to chasing them up and down corridors, through air vents, and onto baggage carousels. One would have hoped that major airports would have better security than this. The only surveillance cameras are handily located within the holding cells - and in any case prove useless against the wiles of an ingenious teenager with a walkie-talkie.

Director Paul Feig cut his teeth as a writer for the short-lived cult US TV series Freaks and Geeks, then went on to direct episodes of Arrested Development and the US version of The Office. All good stuff, but he seems to have been lobotomized en-route to the big screen. Even from the pre-title gags it's clear that something is off: the young cast is encouraged to mug away as if they were auditioning for a panto in Basingstoke, and the jokes fall so flat you have to wonder whether reshoots were out of the question. Don't worry: things improve about 85 minutes later when the lights come up.

Tom Charity