Valentine's Day

Ladies, get your red wine and ice-cream ready for the perfect blend of break-ups, make-ups, awkward moments, sex, new love, Queen Latifah, old love, Abercrombie models, tears, and Ashton Kutcher.  “Valentine’s Day” may not live up to the high-points of other ensemble romantic comedies such as “Love, Actually” or “He’s Just Not that Into You,” it will likely please you in a way that only Leonidas and Jake Sully can please my manly, manly soul.

Men, if you’re reading this review, first thank you, second, it’s a pretty solid Valentine’s Day choice; your date will be happy, you won’t be miserable, you’ll laugh multiple times, but try your best to suspend your disbelief and not attempt to figure out the plot twists, such as they are.  Though “Valentine’s Day” works well as a fluffy date movie, from a critical standpoint, not even a great cast can elevate the insubstantial and thoroughly contrived storyline.

A film focusing on a single day in the lives of 21 people is bound to have poor character development.  All of the characters are one-dimensional, except for the surprisingly excellent Ashton Kutcher.  As the film’s central character, Kutcher undergoes the most changes over the course of the day and gradually wins over the audience with his combination of charm and down-to-earth attitude.  In a film directed by the menopausal king of chick flicks, Garry Marshal (“Pretty Woman,” “Runaway Bride,” “Overboard,” and “The Princess Diaries”) it’s nice to see at least one character who isn’t a slimy, cheating scumbag.

Apart from Kutcher, Jamie Foxx, Bradley Cooper, and Queen Latifah all deliver strong performances, especially considering the extraordinarily limited amount of screen time they have to work with.  The rest of the A-list ensemble, however, are somewhat poorly chosen, seemingly cast in the movie only for name recognition.

For example, Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” is arguably a great song, not just for country fans or tweens, but for the earth. Yet, though Swift may be the songbird of our generation, she is a terrible actress.  Cast as a ditsy and shallow high school senior, a job that shouldn’t be too much of a stretch for Swift, the squinty-eyed blonde delivers forced line-readings and is generally far too over the top.   Her boyfriend is played by real life boyfriend Taylor Lautner, who surprisingly displays more range as a werewolf.  Suffice it to say that this film does little for the “US Weekly” power-couple.

Other actors fare equally poorly.  Anne Hathaway, the Hasty Pudding Theatrical Society’s newly beloved Woman of the Year, is somehow both weird and unattractive.  Hathaway, whose character moonlights as an unsympathetic accent-swapping phone-sex operator, should have had the opportunity to flex her acting muscles­—as she did in “Havoc” when she loses her top and has group sex with Hispanic gang members, thus shedding her persona as “Princess Diaries” sweetheart.  Hathaway can do much better, and so could the veteran Julia Roberts—she’s not even trying in “Valentine’s Day,” but she’s Julia Roberts, so she can coast on her star status.

No matter how many critics bash this movie, chances are that hordes of romantics are still going to go see it, even if “Love, Actually” is ten times better.  Though the latter film has as big an ensemble cast, it somehow manages to connect to a viewer, likely because the movie’s plot does not unfold over such a limited time-span.

Hollywood took a hint from Hallmark—if you call your movie “Valentine’s Day,” people are going to happily fork over cash to see it, no matter how forgettable it is.