Valentine’s Day (2010)

Directed by Garry Marshall. Starring Ashton Kutcher, Jennifer Garner, Anne Hathaway, Topher Grace, Jamie Foxx, Jessica Biel, Héctor Elizondo, Emma Roberts, George Lopez, Eric Dane, Bradley Cooper, Julia Roberts, Shirley MacLaine, Patrick Dempsey, Queen Latifah, Carter Jenkins, Jessica Alba, Bryce Robinson, Taylor Swift, Taylor Lautner, Katherine LaNasa, Matthew Walker, Megan Suri, Kathy Bates. [PG-13]

Pointless patchwork of labored love stories on Valentine’s Day (were you expecting Yom Kippur?), all of them connected in a largely contrived fashion to at least one other thread, sometimes up front and sometimes through an inane revelation late in the lengthy show. Whether it’s Grace discovering that the young lady (Hathaway) he just started dating is secretly a phone sex operator or Kutcher hesitating to tell best pal Garner that the guy (Dempsey) she’s seeing is still married, they’re all superficial, sentimental, and quite bad, but while some are almost tolerable from the outset, others immediately make you reminisce fondly of time spent scrubbing mildew off the bathtub. The longer it goes on, the more insufferable it becomes, in part because director Marshall’s insipid aesthetics supply no personality whatsoever to the incidents, but largely because of relentless stereotyping (gender and racial), sub-sitcom humor (just look at Biel’s introduction), and tonal disarray (episodes involving an old married couple and airplane passengers succumb to sappiness in a snap, while slapstick dominates elsewhere, and one sequence of humiliation actually feels lifted from the American Pie movies). Almost makes one appreciate the comparably accomplished Love Actually (almost); it’s like opening a heart-shaped box of chocolate and all the candies inside are filled with a varied selection of expired seafood. Abysmal soundtrack includes a couple of tunes from co-star Swift, but they’re no worse than her performance, which might be intended as a send-up of shallow, single-minded teenagers, but who’s to say? Julia Roberts was famously paid $3 million for just a few days of shooting, approximately twelve grand per word spoken onscreen!

19/100