The Christmas film is a genre as old as screwball or noir, and it has given us some of the finest moments in cinema – from George Bailey giddily running down a snow-lined street in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” to the hero of “A Christmas Story” shooting his eye out with a prized gift. But for every treasured classic, there are dozens of crass train wrecks like “Christmas With the Kranks,” a new film that should make Scrooges of even the most die-hard Yuletide junkies.

Based on John Grisham’s novel “Skipping Christmas”(yet refreshingly lawyer-free), “Christmas With the Kranks” is high-concept, low-brow piffle; it’s pure, triple-X emotional pornography. It starts with the question “If Christmas is for the children, what happens when they grow up?” but ends with the answer “It doesn’t matter; go spend money on a tree, a canned ham, and a dozen of bottles of liquor.”

The movie opens promisingly, as Luther Krank (Tim Allen) and his wife Nora (Jamie Lee Curtis) say goodbye to their 23-year-old daughter (Julie Ganzalo), who’s set for Peru, care of the Peace Corps. Through tearful goodbyes, her parents endure the terrible news that she might not be home for the holidays. The vacancy in their schedule, though, inspires Mr. Allen to suggest a taboo idea: Since their daughter, whom they fall over themselves to please with decorations and parties, isn’t coming home – why not skip Christmas and go on a hedonistic cruise through the Caribbean?

It’s a reasonable idea, and certainly not as shocking as the film pretends it is. But then again, the concept allows Mr. Allen to be funny as a suburban Scrooge, telling coworkers he won’t be participating in “Secret Santa” rituals and coldly turning down a group of local Boy Scouts trying to sell him a Christmas tree. Dan Ackroyd briefly shines as a neighborhood tradition boss who bullies all who fail to stick to the rigid holiday protocols.

I’m the kind of guy who celebrates Christmas by watching “Bad Santa,” and I enjoyed the anti-Christmas jokes that fill the first half of the film. But the comedy soon dissipates as the movie’s setup withers before the paint-by-numbers-ish sappy Christmas conclusion: child comes home, hearts change, halls are decked. Satire descends into second-rate slapstick as Mr. Allen reprises Chevy Chase’s decorating hijinks.

The members of the cast should be ashamed, as all of them could have done better – and have in the past. Tim Allen was the star of the recent, far more successful Christmas film, “The Santa Clause” (and its sequel). Two decades ago Ms. Curtis and Mr. Ackroyd – who now languishes eternally in hipster god Bill Murray’s shadow – made “Trading Places,” itself a sort of Christmas classic. But here they do nothing to save this 90-minute sitcom, written and produced by “Home Alone” and “Harry Potter” impresario Chris Columbus.

The problem with “Christmas With the Kranks” is that it can’t decide whether it’s mocking common Christmas conventions or embracing them. It wants to parody the gross commercialization of the season while succumbing to the sentimental, 11th-hour “lessons” that are the fruitcake and egg nog of such movies. But any such edifying moral is drowned in the sugary coating with which the filmmakers hide the cynical ethics of their shopping-mall Wonderland.