The performers involved really make a difference in how this film turns out. Ben Affleck, James Gandolfini, Christina Applegate and Catherine O'Hara were, to be frank, the primary reasons I found it tolerable—at least for me. If different actors had been cast, I wouldn’t have anything good to say about it. As a holiday movie, it feels excessively harsh. That’s often the case with these kinds of films so that something positive can eventually happen, but here it goes too far and the eventual resolution isn't particularly satisfying. The characters needed to be more appealing if they were only going to be redeemed slightly. *Surviving Christmas* is at least fairly brief, clocking in around 90 minutes, and contains a few (though perhaps not enough) funny parts. There’s also an unexpectedly relevant discussion about inadvertently giving away the rights to your image through photos—I'm thinking of the current Instagram phenomenon.

Source on TMDB