Family-fueled angst comes home for the holidays

In "This Christmas," (from left) Chris Brown, Loretta Devine, Columbus Short, Lupe Ontiveros, Regina King, and Sharon Leal gather for the holidays - with plenty of family issues to navigate. (suzanne tenner/screen gems)

If neither your sister with the shady, chauvinist husband nor the two bookies trying to shake down 25 grand from your jazz-musician brother can make it to Thanksgiving dinner, don't worry. They're probably at the Whitfield's, and you can mosey down to the megaplex to collect them, along with all the other made-for-TV craziness afoot in "This Christmas," one of those overstaffed, overstuffed "when do we eat?" holiday dramedies. Call it a double-extra-strength episode of "Soul Food."

Regina King shares the movie with a lot of talented actors and pretty faces playing the Whitfields - six grown kids, one semi-neurotic mother (Loretta Devine), and their assorted significant others. This is a loving family with just enough bitterness for almost every scene to culminate in a showdown.

King plays Lisa, the sister who resents having not gone to college in order to help maintain the family's Los Angeles-area dry-cleaning business. As a consolation, she did marry a haughty Princeton grad (Laz Alonzo). But her sister Kelli (the excellent Sharon Leal) knows he's not worth a damn. He makes Lisa wait on him, raise his two kids, and tries to get her to convince her siblings to sell the store and the family house so he can put the proceeds to selfish personal ends.

There is much more. Claude (Columbus Short, from "Stomp the Yard") has come home from the military with a gun and a few secrets. Those furtive phone calls he makes shamelessly bait you into thinking he's gay (the movie's not that daring). But what he is hiding would definitely be headline news at my holiday dinner. Meanwhile, Quentin (Idris Elba) shows up on the run from the aforementioned bookies and hates hates hates his mother's "friend," Joe Black (Delroy Lindo), basically for not being his own daddy, a music man who ran off years ago, but whom his mother, called Ma'Dere, can't get over.

Obviously, "This Christmas" is unreasonably chock-full of everything - there's even a part for the seductive charms of executive producer Mekhi Phifer as a Whitfield suitor. And what exactly is Lupe Ontiveros to this family besides the woman who stands in the kitchen while everybody else talks?

With all due respect to the imagination of the writer and director, Preston A. Whitmore II, the movie's kitchen-sink tone, defensively bourgeois characters, and embrace of the rambunctious over the realistic is not terribly far removed from Tyler Perry territory. When King squirts baby oil on the bathroom floor as a prelude to comic retaliation, I could imagine Perry kicking himself for not coming up with that first. The scene brings down the house.

As with Perry's movies and plays, "This Christmas" is well stocked with crowd-pleasing options. Don't like the plot about Claude and his problems? Then maybe the story line involving the singing dancer Chris Brown as "Baby" Whitfield will do the trick. It did the night I saw the movie. When the camera finds him sitting shirtless, it was scream at first sight. (His tattoos are never this legible on an iPod screen.) Brown performs two whole songs - one in a club, one in a church. The two settings capture the movie's bi-devotional spirit (it's secular and worshipful at the same time). They're also proof that when he's not out of breath Brown can croon.

But the movie, with its almost pathological need to please, ends with a cast-wide "Soul Train Line" where Brown does get to do his hydraulic dance moves. It's unnecessary, but maybe more movies should take this route. Who wouldn't love to have seen Russell Crowe do the cabbage patch at the end of "American Gangster"?

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.