Review #8

VALENTINE'S DAY

  

Released: 2010

Director: Garry Marshall

Starring: Pretty much every modern rom com star except Katherine Heigl

Grade: C-

When I was a kid and my friends and I had access to a soda fountain, we would make something we called “soda surprise.” The recipe basically consisted of mixing all of the sodas together into one cup. Coke combined with a bit of root beer, a swirl of Sprite, a dash of orange soda, and a splash of Dr. Pepper. I always imagined my “soda surprise” would be the soda to end all soda, with more pop and fizz than any other soda before. In reality, I ended up with a cup of bland, sugary, slightly orange-flavored liquid. My soda surprise was much less than the sum of its parts. Valentine’s Day is like that soda surprise. A bland, sugary-sweet mess that achieves so much less than it sets out to do.

Valentine’s Day (and the more recent New Year’s Eve) blatantly rip-off the much superior Love Actually. Like an amateur’s attempt at duplicating a Monet, the copy resembles the original in only the most general form. While Love Actually delicately balanced stories to maximize drama, comedy, and romance, Valentine’s Day just throws everything it can think of onscreen and hopes something sticks. Pretty much every one of my Top 10 Cliches is haphazardly combined in a pretty, sleek, celebrity-filled package.

I wouldn’t exactly call the result a disaster. I mean, don’t get me wrong, Valentine’s Day is a terrible movie, but it’s pretty inoffensive in its terribleness. There are twelve thousand plotlines, and if you find one boring, a new one will take its place only moments later. It’s pretty difficult to care about anything that’s happening onscreen, but the onslaught of actors means you get the same sort of amusement you might get while reading a celebrity magazine. By my count the movie has:

2 Taylors (Swift and Lautner)

2 Jessicas (Alba and Biel)

4 sets of reunited costars (from, respectively, That 70s Show, The Princess Diaries, Grey’s Anatomy, and Pretty Woman)

2 family members (Roberts and Roberts)

4 Academy Award winners (Roberts, Fox, MacLaine, Bates)

The film seems to think the most entertaining thing in the world is to make its characters’ lives intersect as much as possible. There’s a lot of “Oh he’s her student!” “She’s his boss!” "Those two are neighbors!" Coincidence does not equal intelligence, however, and there’s nothing particularly witty about the script or performances. The stakes feel decidedly low and everyone but two explicitly evil characters ends up with a happy ending. Love Actually was smart enough to tinge it’s Christmas-cookie-romance with a few somber moments, but Valentine’s Day is all frosting and sprinkles with no substance.

It’s pretty impressive how openly Valentine’s Day rips off Love Actually, most obviously in the precocious child determined to confess his love storyline. It seems mean to criticize the skills of a child actor, but this kid is just so bad. There’s also an apology that tries to be Love Actually’s card-confession scene and doesn’t even come close.

The films biggest flaw is that it tries to give every story equal weight, rather than allowing some to take the forefront. I suppose Ashton Kutcher could be considered the film’s central focus. At the very least, his story bookends the film. As I mentioned in my No Strings Attached review, I enjoy Ashton’s goofy charm so he seems as good a choice as any to helm the film. It was sort of a crapshoot how much I liked the other numerous plotlines. I enjoyed Anne Hathaway’s bored phone sex operator and the way Emma Roberts' eighteen-year-old had such straightforward mentality about sex. (I gave up on trying to figure out the names of these characters as soon as it became clear the film didn’t care about them.) Jessica Biel’s neurotic PR agent made me laugh (although I have a hard time believing she would ever be forced to spend a Valentine’s Day alone. Or any day for that matter). Eric Dane’s plotline is boring until a nice twist at the end. Jamie Foxx is as annoying as usual, and Julia Roberts makes more of an impression in a post-credit blooper than in the actual film. The wise-black-man archetype is replaced by, of all things, George Lopez. Patrick Dempsey juggles because that’s a charming thing someone once discovered he could do. Jennifer Garner is perky. The two Taylors are either great actors playing dumb or dumb actors playing themselves (I’ll leave that up for you to decide). Queen Latifah and Kathy Bates play characters that surely would have been cut had they not been played by Queen Latifah and Kathy Bates. 

All of the stories are about love, but they don’t really speak to one another or juxtapose against one another or contradict each other. They just exist together because a movie studio realized audiences might want to see a lot of celebrities onscreen together. Considering the movie made over $100,000,000, I think that was a correct assumption. None of the plots carry much weight and on top of being too long, the whole thing feels pretty anticlimactic. Just like that soda surprise, Valentine’s Day works much better as a concept than it does in execution.

Reality factor: The only realistic part of this movie is that no one lets Jessica Biel’s character eat. So that’s how she stays so thin.  [2 out of 5]

Eye-candy factor: Just based on the number of people in this film, I have to assume there is someone for everyone to ogle. My personal favorite is the endearingly awkward Topher Grace. [4 out of 5]

Aww factor: "Eating too much ice cream can make ice cream sound really unappealing." Replace “ice cream” with “romance” and you have a good idea of how I felt about this film’s schmaltz. [2 out of 5]