Nancy Meyers’s The Holiday is a romantic comedy set during the countdown to Christmas. It promises to make you laugh and make you cry. It’s a film that says: “Come and see me and you’ll leave with a smile on your face and a warm, gooey glow inside.” But watching it is like turning up at a Christmas banquet and, instead of a delicious home-cooked meal, sitting down to six courses of aeroplane food.

It’s easy for men to sneer at so-called “chick flicks”, but I can appreciate a good romantic comedy — When Harry Met Sally or Bridget Jones’s Diary — as much as the next woman. The Holiday, however, isn’t in the league of those two films. Meyers, best known for What Women Want and Something’s Gotta Give, hasn’t got the Jewish smarts and schmaltz of Nora Ephron at her best, or the comic talent of Helen Fielding. But she does know what studios want: undemanding romantic comedies with big names.

Yes, The Holiday has a lot of stars in it (Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, Jude Law), but no soul and no style of its own. It’s the story of two very different women with the same problem: men. Iris (Winslet) is an English journalist who is in love with a cute but caddish colleague called Jasper (Rufus Sewell). She treats him like a god; he treats her like a doormat. Listening to the story of Iris’s mistreatment by Jasper, her friend says: “I never knew how pathetic you were.” It’s hard to disagree. Iris blubs, moans and groans for most of the film. When she learns that the cute cad is about to marry someone else, she decides that she’s had enough and that she has to find a way to get over this man.

Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, in LA, Amanda (Diaz) is breaking up with her boyfriend (Edward Burns), who has been cheating on her. Amanda is a workaholic with issues who always keeps the men in her life at arm’s length. So, while Iris is blubbing back in Blighty, Amanda is in LA, all stressed out and with nowhere to go. Both women decide that, with Christmas coming up, they need to take a break from their life. Thanks to the internet, the two swap homes.

At first, Iris and Amanda are overjoyed by their new settings — then the old problem of men turns up. Amanda ends up with Iris’s handsome brother, Graham (Law), who staggers drunkenly into her bed one night. Iris develops a friendship with Arthur (Eli Wallach), a famous screenwriter, then falls for Miles (Jack Black), a sweet guy who knows all about falling for the wrong type.

You’d think that the two story lines, with two leading women living in two countries, would provide an interesting contrast. But The Holiday looks like one big, glossy mush of good-looking people in good-looking houses. (Even the podgy Black looks good.) People and places all look as if they have been Botoxed and plucked and given a fake tan. Winslet’s teeth are as perfect as Diaz’s. These characters have nothing unique about them; they all have “issues” and problems that are too clichéd even for women’s magazines. None of that would matter if the film had been funnier. But comedy has never been Meyers’s strong point.

Diaz, instead of being funny, is merely irritating in her attempt to do the comedy of panic and stress that Diane Keaton used to do so well. And the idea that a crazy American driving on the right-hand side of the English road (as Amanda does) is somehow hilarious shows how inept Meyers’s comic sense is. As for poor Law, you can sense how bored he is by having to play another handsome charmer. He knows his part is so underwritten that there’s nothing he can do but smile and snog. And Black could have provided a bit of male oomph or comic madness, but he’s so laid-back, he’s hardly there at all.

The one redeeming feature of the film is Winslet. Is there a more attractive star, with more sheer likeability, in film today? Her character is a walking cliché, but she infuses her with a warmth that makes us care about her fate.

The Holiday is one of those films that make allusions to other films in the romcom genre. (It even explains to the audience the origins of “meet-cute”.) And Meyers clearly thinks her film belongs in the tradition of great women’s pictures by the likes of Preston Sturges. But there is no wit or sophistication to be found here. This is a film that gives itself a big hug.

At one point, Iris asks her friend Arthur whether Hollywood in the old days was really as great as people say, and he assures her that it was. Watching The Holiday, you can only agree with him.

The Holiday, Two stars
12A, 135 mins

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• London Film Festival

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010