Movie Review: “Valentine’s Day”

If legend is to be believed, Valentine’s Day honors St. Valentine, a martyred priest.  It is told that during the third century, Roman Emperor Claudius II felt that marriage weakened his soldiers, thereby forbidding it. Valentine defied this law and married soldiers anyway, resulting in his imprisonment and subsequent execution. Valentine died for love.

Ironically, I wished someone would just execute me as I suffered through Garry Marshall’s new comedy, Valentine’s Day.

Valentine’s Day is an ensemble comedy, featuring about twenty  A- & B-list stars as characters with various intersecting story arcs (none of which prove to be very interesting). Let’s get this over with:

Kate (Julia Roberts) is an American soldier on a plane to Los Angeles for a brief one-day visit home on Valentine’s Day. She is sitting next to and conversing with Holden (Bradley Cooper), who isn’t too excited about the holiday as he just ended a long-term relationship.

On the ground in L.A., a florist named Reed (Ashton Kutcher) proposes to his girlfriend, Morley (Jessica Alba). She says yes. Reed then rushes to tell his friends Alphonso (George Lopez), who delivers flowers for him, and Julia (Jennifer Garner), an elementary school teacher. Julia has recently fallen for Dr. Harrison Copeland (Patrick Dempsey), but doesn’t know that he is married.

One of Julia’s students, Edison (Bryce Robinson), comes into the store to order flowers for his crush. Edison lives with his grandparents, Edgar (Hector Elizondo) and Estelle (Shirley MacLaine), who are having a marriage crisis, and is often watched by his nanny, Grace (Emma Roberts, real-life niece to costar Julia Roberts). Grace is planning on having sex with her boyfriend for the first time later that day. She is friends with Willy (Taylor Lautner) and Felicia (Taylor Swift), who are waiting to have sex.

Elsewhere, Sean Jackson (Eric Dane) is an aging football player contemplating the future of his career with his publicist, Kara (Jessica Biel), and agent, Paula (Queen Latifah). Paula’s new secretary, Liz (Anne Hathaway), is trying to hide her second job as a phone-sex operator from her new co-worker boyfriend, Jason (Topher Grace).

Then some stuff happens, the characters all end up connected in one way or another, blah, blah, blah. By time I understood what was going on, I had stopped caring.

The biggest (but definitely not only) problem with Valentine’s Day is that it is so cluttered with star power, it’s distracting. The whole charade feels more like an episode of TMZ than it does a movie. The characters aren’t developed enough to distract from the stars playing them. With so many characters, we only get about 10 minutes with each, so audiences cannot connect with who they are watching on screen. As a result, the events of the film register as unimportant and emotionally empty.

The scenes in the film which are played for laughs contain overused jokes that produce groans rather than laughs, with one unexpected exception. One particular scene features Taylor Lautner’s character explaining that he is uncomfortable taking his shirt off in public, which is hilarious to anyone familiar with his role in New Moon or saw his hosting gig on Saturday Night Live. Unfortunately, this isn’t even funny in the context of the movie. It should serve as a testament to the quality of Valentine’s Day that the only genuine laugh comes from a moment that completely takes you out of the film, which is what I wanted all along: to escape from this pile of garbage.

Overall Rating: