Valentine's Day review

Have you seen the ads for Valentine’s Day? If a bus has passed you by in recent weeks, you almost certainly have. There are some variations of the ad, but the two most prominent types are just a collage of either male or female faces. They don’t tell you much about the film except a- that it’s got movie stars in it, and b- it’s called Valentine’s Day. Look at those teeth! The ads look like they’re promoting toothpaste.

Some have dubbed Valentine’s Day ‘Love Actually 2’, and that gives a very fair indication of what the film is. Valentine’s Day is a collage of interlocking star-studded love stories, all set around the same holiday and mostly with white actors despite taking place in an ethnic melting pot (LA this time). It’s even got a little love-sick boy, who, like many cinematic children, is blessed (cursed?) with the gift (curse?) of speaking like a pedantic adult. It’s not as good as Love Actually.

So here’s a quick rundown of the stories: Jamie Foxx is a cynical sports reporter forced into doing location reports about Valentine’s Day, Ashton Kutcher is a hopelessly romantic florist who’s just proposed to his slightly frosty girlfriend (Jessica Alba), Shirley McLane and Hector Elizondo play an aging married couple who don’t have it all worked out yet, Emma Roberts (Julia’s niece) is a high school girl who wants to lose her virginity, Julia Roberts (Emma’s aunt!) is a soldier coming home for Valentine’s Day who meets a nice man on a plane (Bradley Cooper), Jessica Biel is a lonely publicist, Jennifer Garner is a teacher who’s just unwittingly started an affair with someone who’s married (Patrick Dempsey) Anne Hathaway is a phone sex employee, and so on. Oh, and Taylors Swift (popular singer) and Lautner (Twilight wolf) have a brief appearance as a teen couple. I think that’s it.

Valentine’s Day is very glossy and, inevitably, fast-paced. It’s innocuous enough, but also terribly toothless and conspicuously laugh-free. I know it’s a pleasant to see so many movie stars in the one film (most of whom are charismatic, watchable and attractive, natch), but the multiple strands create numerous problems: Many of the stories are so thin and barely developed that they might as well have been excised entirely (the Anne Hathaway one is especially flimsy, and that little blonde kid was unbearable), and other stories barely get room to breath. It’s like flicking between three soap operas and three sit-coms.

Zipping around from story to story, I found Valentine’s Day most interesting as an audition tape for future romantic comedies. Some of the actors showed a natural gift for the genre, while others seemed lost at sea: Ashton Kutcher is likeable, Jamie Foxx is suave, Jennifer Garner is adorable and Taylor Swift is surprisingly confident and fun. On the debit side, Taylor Lautner is a charisma vacuum once again, Patrick Dempsey proves why he’s never broken through to the A-list, and many actors look bored, especially Julia Roberts, Bradley Cooper and Topher Grace.

Plenty of people (perhaps including you, dear reader) will see Valentine’s Day either because they think it looks nice based on the trailer or because they’ll be dragged there on opening weekend. Think of it as payback for the time you made your girlfriend watch The Shining.