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