While the number of slapstick Christmas comedies usually go off the charts this time of year as much as Santa’s cholesterol, the Christmas family dramedy is the other holiday sub-genre that usually demands screen time in December.

Last year, “This Christmas” featured an African American family reuniting for the holidays after four years. In 2005, Sarah Jessica Parker met “The Family Stone” and experienced all their dysfunctional love. This year, Christmas gets a little Latin flare Puerto Rican-style with “Nothing Like the Holidays.” The film follows the Rodriguez family from the Humboldt Park area in Chicago as they come together in what might be the final Christmas they spend together as a family.

The reason: Anna Rodriguez (Elizabeth Pena) has announced over dinner that she has decided to divorce her children’s father Edy (Alfred Molina) after 36 years of marriage. She has reason to believe he has been having an affair. No one takes the news lightly including Mauricio (John Leguizamo), one of the Rodriguez boys, who has become a successful lawyer in New York, and his sister Roxanna (Vanessa Ferlito), a struggling actress living in Los Angeles.

Freddy Rodriguez (“Grindhouse”) plays Jesse, another Rodriguez brother, back home from Iraq. He thinks his parents are adult enough to make their own decisions. His mind isn’t really focused on his mom and dad’s problems, especially since he has a handful of his own. He has returned home to find his ex-girlfriend Marissa (Melonie Diaz), whom he still loves, has moved on with her life. He is also still haunted by the death of one of his friends in the military.

It’s not only Jesse, however, who has issues. Everyone has something going on in his or her trying life and debut screenwriters Alison Swan and Rick Najera tangle it all together in a cinematic version of stale fruitcake. While storylines that focus on Jesse and his hardships give the film a more serious tone than your average family head-butting session, there’s not much time to build on his character since the script seems sculpted from the blueprint of a tiresome telenovela. Instead, secondary stories like Maruicio and his wife Sarah (Debra Messing) arguing about the best time to have a baby, and issues that revolve around Ozzy (Jay Hernandez), a family friend and ex-gang member who is bothered that the guy who killed his brother years ago has been released from prison and is now hanging out in the old neighborhood.

The scene-stealer of the film is Luis Guzman (“Waiting”), who plays the family’s kooky electronics-loving uncle, but he and Freddy Rodriguez (one of the most talented young Latino actors working today) can’t raise the film above the usual stereotypical family dramedy we get every year. It might be in different packaging this time around, but a pair of socks is a pair of socks no matter how colorful the gift-wrapping.

“Hamlet 2” is so politically incorrect, it makes “Springtime for Hitler” from “The Producers” sound suitable for preschoolers to sing.

The film begins and ends with Steve Coogan as Dana Marschz, a Tucson high school drama teacher, who proves that “if you can’t do, teach” wasn’t just a saying created to piss off teachers. Dana hasn’t had much luck as an actor other than the few infomercials and herpes commercials he’s starred in.

He falls back on teaching drama despite being the laughing stock of the entire school for the horrid plays he writes, produces and directs. Adapting “Erin Brockovich” as a stage production really isn’t a great way to show the school that they should keep funding the program.

It really doesn’t matter anyway. Dana only has two high-spirited students in his class, and it seems like the principal is about to drop the bomb on theater unless they start making some worthwhile plays. When the new school year begins, however, Dana, who is having some slightly dysfunctional problems at home with his wife (Catherine Keener), is surprised when his drama class is filled to maximum capacity with new students. Unfortunately, the mostly-Latino group of kids are only there because they couldn’t take the courses they really wanted so were funneled into drama to slack off.

But when Dana decides to write a sequel to William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” the students must rise up against the school and community who become infuriated with the blasphemy-filled script Dana has written for the them to perform.

While director/writer Andrew Fleming pulls no stops, a few gags go a bit long before falling flat. Still, there is enough wickedness and total lack of morality (a lot of it hilarious) that will have you asking why Steve Coogan isn’t in more mainstream comedies (he is in “Tropic Thunder,” of course). With “Hamlet 2” Coogan has proven that British comedy sometimes does translate well for us American heathens.