It's December 26th, and Basil (Huston) is leaving his wife and kids at home in LA to head to Denver to chase up a development deal on some homes that have been foreclosed. Just shy of the money needed to close the deal, Basil manages to talk his local church into donating the $3.5 million they had saved for their renovation towards his cause. Once he gets to Denver, he meets his chauffeur for the day, Nick (Jacobs). Nick is a man at the receiving end of a restraining order, placed upon him by the mother of his kids for a vaguely-alluded-to argument they had. And so, the stage is set for these two opposing men - one rich but basically dead inside, the other poor but brimming over with emotion - to clash over the course of their day together.
Unfortunately, the movie never develops any further than this stage, dragging its feet along from one plodding scene to the next. Huston is by all accounts a good actor, but the rhymes-with-schmickhead character he plays here is painfully one-dimensional. What's more, coupled with the rotten dialogue he has to work with, there was simply no way he could have given anything more than this dreadful performance. The same goes for Jacobs, a relative unknown, as he emerges no better from this mess than Huston does. Their dire conversations about the nature of consumerism and the greed of man are supposedly a modern update of Leo Tolstoy's novel "Master & Man", but it makes no difference; a bad script is a bad script.
Between the horrid hand-held shaky-cam and the cloyingly overbearing score, there is very little to recommend here in Boxing Day. There are one or two moments between Basil and Nick when they're characters become so infuriating that it should generate a hugely negative response in the audience, but when the biggest compliment for a movie is "It will annoy you", you know you're clutching at straws. In a word; avoid.
