The Holiday Spoils itself without any help here.

Rating: 3/10 (19 January 2008)

Don't worry about the mild spoilers here, the movie spoils itself very soon after the title sequence.
Even romantic comedies need a story with some kind of anticipation or suspense. Even mediocre romantic comedies have twists in the story and lead the view down one path before springing an unsuspected element on them. But truly awfully bad romantic comedies do not need any of that because you can discover in the first 5 minutes of the film what the final scene will be. You know who will end up with whom and you will know why. You just have to watch how they move from development of character to the final and very obvious conclusion.
The Holiday is just that kind of movie. So if you love romantic comedies and love to predict without any chance of being wrong, this is the movie you should see. But it is not a good movie, just an overly sweet story where four good actors made some quick easy money and walked away without looking back.
Ms. Diaz is as charming as ever but did not fit this role or do it justice in the slightest. Nothing about her performance convinced me she was who she was playing or could actually even be that person. Ms. Winslet was a bit more charming and convincing but only when she was in her scenes with Eli Wallach - the only character in the whole film that brought anything to the role or made me even care about the film. I was more interested to see if Arthur Abbott (Wallach) was going to make the big event honoring him or not.
Using Jude Law was a waste of great talent on a role that was so tangled I could care less about his character. And Jack Black is...well Jack Black. Sometimes charming, sometimes childish and sometimes acting as if his character was in a different movie.
So after three of the four main characters had been introduced and the story began to develop, I knew Miles (Black) and Iris (Winslet) would be together in the end and they had not even met in the movie yet. And when Graham (Law) stumbled drunk into the cottage where Amanda (Diaz) was staying, I knew the knot had been all but tied.
But when the limo driver would not drive down the lane to drop Diaz off at the cottage when she arrived (because he would not be able to turn around "down the lane"), and we see her dragging two large suitcases through the snow for several hundred meters, I knew that the director/writer were more skilled at contrivance than at either directing or writing. I was proved right when the same limo driver somehow shows up at the cottage to pick Amanda up near the end of the movie. And somewhere on the lane from the cottage, when Amanda demands he go back, he turns around with no difficulty. Not good enough, Amanda, in what is a mix of hot flash and panic attack acting runs ahead of the limo across fields and through gates she never closes to return to her love in the cottage. That was the comedy part I laughed at finally. I'm still looking for the romantic part.
But writers and directors have to start somewhere so I give this pair a 3 and do not blame good actors for being a movie that is not worth the time or money to even rent it.