Call it the romantic in me, or label me a sap, but I didn't hate it. I didn't love it, but I didn't hate it.
Director Garry Marshall and writer Katherine Fugate present several tales of love, heartache and loss one Valentine's Day in Los Angeles. Of course, they are all kind of intertwined, and figuring out how is part of the fun (unless you figure it out early in the movie, like most people will, then it's just predictable).
Reed (Ashton Kutcher) has proposed to his girlfriend, Morley (Jessica Alba playing the worst named female character in the history of movies), yet, no one can believe she said yes.
Julia (Jennifer Garner) is in love with her new, McDreamy boyfriend, Harrison (Patrick Dempsey), and wants to fly off to San Francisco to surprise him.
Holden (Bradley Cooper) and Kate (Julia Roberts) strike up a conversation during a long flight home, but can each one get to the one they love?
Jason (Topher Grace) is madly, head over heels for the lady he has been dating for a couple weeks, Liz (Anne Hathaway), but she seems to be hiding something from him.
Willie (Taylor Lautner) is trying to impress his girlfriend, Felicia (Taylor Swift, who might be the first beautiful young blonde in modern history to fall for a guy named Willie, as far as I know from firsthand knowledge).
And, a whole bunch of other people have love stories to
conquer, but there are too many to list here, which highlights one of the
problems with Valentine's Day. It's a
movie with too many stories.
While none of them are hard to follow, none of the plots are very well developed, either. We only get the bare minimum and superficial aspects of each character and each story, which makes you long for something more in depth. Marshall and Fugate present the most predictable, safest stories possible, and could have cut out a few of them to make Valentine's Day more substantial.
Also, Valentine's Day is a movie full of cute fluff instead of passion. Sure, we root for the young elementary school boy who is trying his hardest to let the girl he is crushing on know about his feelings for her. Yes, we giggle when some of the characters get together for an anti-Valentine's Day party complete with extreme violence committed against an innocent piñata. However, we all know love is much more complicated than what we are seeing here on the screen. Maybe Marshall and Fugate are trying to give us a retreat from reality, but reality is too obvious and more interesting.
Valentine's Day features so many characters any actor or
actress who didn't get a call for this one needs to fire his agent.
1 ½ Waffles (Out of 4)
Valentine's Day is rated PG-13 for some sexual material and brief partial nudity.
