This Christmas (Blu-ray)

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"This Christmas" is being billed as a new holiday tradition, but then again, every Christmas movie hopes to crack the rotation of holiday films that people watch year after year. I'm not sure this will be one of them, though. It's more soapy than snowy, it's so familiar that I could predict who was going to do what just by the way the characters were introduced in Act 1, and there are a few headsnappers you don't usually see in a holiday movie . . . like acts of violence.

In fairness, most of us are conditioned to react hesitantly when we hear a holiday movie is about family coming home. After "Home for the Holidays," "The Family Stone," and countless others that didn't even stand as tall as those cinematic Christmas presents, it's like, not again. But as pleasant a surprise as that Stoner film was, this one feels like a Lifetime TV movie with a little attitude tossed in.

Prestan A. Whitmore II directed this light drama about the Whitfields, a clan whose adult children haven't been home for four years. And when you see the suds that bubble up, there's no wondering why. The matriarch of the family is Ma'Dere, played by Loretta Devine, who appeared in a considerably more successful holiday film, "The Preacher's Wife" (1966), and most recently could be seen on TV's "Eli Stone" and "Grey's Anatomy." Her character might be a cliché, but Devine tries to play it with enough understatement to blunt the familiar, and she and her male lead, Delroy Lindo ("Lackawanna Blues," who plays her boyfriend, Joe) manage to anchor this production by their performances, even if they're unable to provide as much steadiness for their fictional family, who are walking basket cases.

Quentin Jr. (Idris Elba, "American Gangster") is the eldest son, a jazz musician who's followed in the footsteps of Quentin Sr., a musician who abandoned the family years ago. Quentin is pursued by a couple a bookie thugs who want to collect a big debt he owes, and encounters with them account for much of the violence. But in the "gimme a break" category, these two and Quentin pretend they're friends when the family catches them, and they're invited to spend Christmas with the Whitfields in the same house. Yeah, like that's ever gonna happen. And if so, that poor Quentin wouldn't have woke up to see the sun shine the next day. But that's another story, and one of this film's defects.

Other defects are the other characters' stories. I mean, must every single family member have something major going on in their lives? Next there's Claude, who's on leave from the Army (but it turns out he's actually A.W.O.L.), and his secret is that he has a white girlfriend who happens to be pregnant.

Melanie (Lauren London) provides a little "ho, ho, ho" for this holiday film, and is called on it by her sisters. She's in her seventh year of college because she changes her major with every boyfriend, one of whom she brings home with her.

Lisa (Regina King) is married to a cheating creep and tries to keep up appearances, though she's troubled by it and her sister, Kelli (Sharon Leal), a career woman with no personal life and no one to trouble her, keeps trying to get her to see that no man is better than a bad man.