Valentine's Day
Jennifer Garner in Valentine's Day
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Wednesday, 10, Feb 2010 11:37
By Richard James.
Directed by Garry Marshall, out February 12th in cinemas, starring Jessica Alba, Kathy Bates, Jessica Biel, Bradley Cooper, Eric Dane, Patrick Dempsey, Hector Elizondo, Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Topher Grace, Anne Hathaway, Ashton Kutcher, Queen Latifah, Taylor Launtner, George Lopez, Shirley MacLaine, Emma Roberts, Julia Roberts and Taylor Swift, running time 125 minutes.
What's it all about?
It's Valentine's Day - the day of love. Those who are in love rejoice in their happiness, while those still searching for it hope by the day's end their soul mate will have miraculously dropped out of the sky and into their laps.
An all-star cast depict a series of intertwining love stories across the city of Los Angeles, featuring romance, heartbreak, joy and tears. If this two-line summary hasn't made you sick yet, wait until you read the verdict…
What the others say
"As gooey and lacking in protein as a chocolate holiday bonbon, Valentine's Day plays like a feature-length commercial produced by the Friends of the Valentine Promotional Society." - Variety
"A couple of touching moments aside, Valentine's Day is as blatantly engineered and resolutely frothy as mid-February date movies get." – Screen International
So is it any good?
Valentine's Day is hands down one of the worst films made in the last five years. It is truly awful. It's hard to think of another film that features such bad acting and woeful dialogue attempting to piece together some of the weakest and most cliché "storylines" every created on the big screen.
Anyone who may have stumbled across the trailer or the film poster may be excused for thinking Valentine's Day was a cheesy Hollywood take on the Love Actually premise – a bunch of heartfelt romantic tales involving a collection of your favourite actors all delivering sweet performances of characters destined to end up in the arms of their true love. If only this film could come close to delivering that frankly sickening prospect it wouldn't be half the disaster it is. Instead what we're presented with is Hollywood's greatest-ever simultaneous cheque cashing with every single one of the actors delivering performances so transparent and fake they should frankly be banned from ever working again.
From the very first scene, with the insanely annoying Ashton Kutcher giving his best impression of a child that's just discovered Father Christmas has been, proposing to a totally wooden and lifeless Jessica Alba, the film bombs. Acting so weak it makes you cringe with embarrassment and a script apparently written by a 13-year-old girl just after watching an episode of the Gilmore Girls, Valentine's Day is one horrific scene after another.
On paper the talent on show in this film is the most impressive since Steven Soderbergh first got Danny Ocean and his band of merry men together. In reality it is a who's who of the biggest sellouts working in Hollywood today. For some (Kutcher, Alba, Latifah) it comes as no surprise, for others (Roberts, Hathaway, Foxx) it’s a damn disgrace and they should all hang their heads in shame for: 1. Signing up to appear in this nightmare, but more importantly 2. seemingly failing to confront the filmmakers at any stage and say: 'Hey, that line I just delivered sounded like it was once written for Dawson's Creek but rejected after it made the cast projectile vomit when attempting to say it.. maybe we should try something else'.
For a film supposedly based on love and what the card-makers would have us believe is the most romantic day of the year, Valentine's Day is hands down one of the most soulless films ever created. The big excitement of working out who ends up paired up with who is so horribly telegraphed within the first half hour the actors may as well have massive signs stuck on their heads reading: "I'm the gay one", "I'm the single mother", "I'm the cheating bastard", "I'm the one who really loves their best friend" etc etc.
And so the criticisms go on and on, too many to mention. Special mention must go to Jessica Biel though who delivers the worst performance of them all, gushing out golden lines such as: "Candy... my only friend, you'll always be here for me" before collapsing on a sofa surrounded by chocolate. Tellingly that kind of utter dross is just the tip of the iceberg.
An appalling film that has not one single redeeming feature, raising the question of how it got such a hugely generous rating below...
0.5/10