Cupid misses bigtime on 'Valentine's Day'
"Valentine's Day" - strategically released just before the title's namesake holiday - presents 20 main characters or so in a constant, high-speed rotation on the silver screen.
All scramble to find romance, flowers, food and chocolates on Cupid's busiest day of the year.
It's just like a Quentin Tarantino movie, but without the time-shifted sequences, interesting characters, riveting dialogue and well-wrought action scenes.
Five things tell us that sitcom guru and Northwestern University grad Garry Marshall directed this film.
1. A camera lingers on a man's sweatshirt bearing a "Northwestern" logo.
2. Hector Elizondo, whom Marshall considers his "good luck" charm, co-stars.
3. Floral explosions erupt on the screen (although none tops the one in Marshall's 1991 "Frankie and Johnny").
4. Marshall makes a Hitchcockian cameo as one of three string musicians.
5. "Valentine's Day" is a mishmash of cutesy poo-ness, boring Hollywood clichés, semi-warm fuzzies, ham-handed song choices and a lot of squandered talent.
Sure, a few of the intertwined subplots are a hoot.
Singer Taylor Swift is the biggest surprise as a shallow, valley high school girl in love with a biceps-obsessed jock.
Anne Hathaway's comic turn as a telephone sex entertainer is bold and brassy without going over the TV sitcom threshold. A wronged woman (Jennifer Garner) serves a chilly dish of revenge to her secretly married surgeon lover (Patrick Dempsey). Call him Dr. McSchemey.
Other subplots?
A bi-racial relationship between a TV sportscaster (Jamie Foxx) and a sports media consultant (a whiny Jessica Biel) feels false and forced, even more so than the other quickset romances.
Most of them pale to the AARP-friendly story of senior citizens Edgar (Elizondo) and Estelle (Shirley MacLaine), whose jeopardized marriage gets magically fixed during one of those fake Hollywood reunions where everyone around them breaks into celebratory applause, as if they've all watched the movie along with us, and know their story.
Katherine Fugate's functional and flat screenplay avoids clever plot inventions or crisp dialogue. It's as if Fugate ran out of creative steam once she figured out how to weave so many characters and stories into a script.
The result is a comedy comprised of superficial sketches that interlink, then come together in a quasi-climax of dance and music resembling the end credits to "Slumdog Millionaire."
One of the movie's largest threads - a boy named Edison (a cute but banal Bryce Robinson) goes on a mission to deliver flowers to his secret girlfriend - begs comparison to Richard Curtis' similarly plotted and superlative "Love, Actually" with Thomas Sangster's heart-breaking performance as a 10-year-old on a similar quest.
Julia Roberts is effectively tough and hard as an army captain who shares a long flight with a handsome businessman (Bradley Cooper).
Queen Latifah phones in the attitude as a surly office boss. Ashton Kutcher's florist has the wedding bell blues for his lover (Jessica Alba). A high school couple played by Carter Jenkins and Emma Roberts struggle to make their abstinent relationship not sound like a PC lecture against teen sex.
Ironically, Marshall once disdained the use of "spit-takes" on TV sitcoms, where characters spit food or drink to express surprise.
Yet, "Valentine's Day" is stuffed with an array of gasps, hard swallows and gurgles to express comic shock.
That doesn't count the ones coming from the audience.
"Valentine's Day"Rating: #9733; #9733;Starring: Jessica Alba, Eric Dane, Julia Roberts, Jennifer Garner, Anne Hathaway, Ashton Kutcher, Patrick Dempsey, Queen Latifah, Shirley MacLaine, Taylor Swift, and othersDirected by: Garry MarshallOther: A Warner Bros. release. Rated PG-13 for partial nudity, sexual situations. 124 minutes