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.
