Valentine’s Day lacks focus
Too many stars, not enough substance
Photo copyright cleared
Julia Fiztpatrick (Jennifer Garner) receives flowers from Reed Bennett (Ashton Kutcher)in the
new film Valentine’s Day.
James Butler
Anne Hathaway (great in Get Smart and receiving an Oscar nomination for Rachel Getting Married) and even lesser ones like Jennifer Garner are completely mailing it in, it gets hard to really care about any of the characters’ problems.
The screenplay itself is one of the movie’s redeeming factors. Despite some cringe-worthy lines, it manages to have points that were actually pretty funny.
With a few too many story lines, however, it stretches itself too thin, trying to move the audience with characters that were not given enough time or effort throughout the film.
It also suffers from Crash syndrome, i.e., it bashes you over the head with its interconnected story lines and overarching theme about the power of love.
The story line with Swift and Lautner was completely unnecessary, and Swift gives one of the worst performances I have ever seen in a big budget film.
This attempt to cash in on Swift’s recent Grammy and Lautner’s New Moon success is obvious, and with the terrible performance each delivers, it was clearly the wrong decision.
Contributor
Most movies in Hollywood these days often have a major star attached to them like George Clooney, Christian Bale, or Jennifer Aniston, but it really is rare for a movie to have as many huge names as
Valentine’s Day.
Clearly catering to the mainstream
date movie audience, Valentine’s Day is
huge on star power, but very low on actual substance.
The biggest surprise about this movie was how they managed to get so many major stars into a motion picture and not get at least one memorable performance out of any of them.
The high profile cast includes Ashton
Kutcher, Jessica Alba, Julia Roberts, Bradley Cooper (most recently from The Hangover), Anne Hathaway, Jessica Biel, Eric Dane and Patrick Dempsey (both of Grey’s Anatomy), Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Taylor Swift and Taylor Lautner. But none of them show any real enthusiasm for their role.
Kutcher was the only actor to even come close, but his often cheesy dialogue killed any real sympathy I felt for his character.
I wanted to like so many of these characters, but when fine actresses like
Valentine’s Day is not the worst
romantic comedy I’ve seen, but it has too many stars and story lines, and doesn’t do enough to make any of them interesting. .
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