Reviewed by GREG KING
Director: Garry Marshall
Stars: 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 Lautner, George Lopez, Shirley MacLaine, Emma Roberts, Julia Roberts, Taylor Swift, Bryce Robinson, Joe Mantegna (uncredited), Rance Howard, Carter Jenkins.
Like the recent He’s Just Not That Into You or an Americanised version of Love Actually, Valentine’s Day is a sprawling, star studded film comprised of a series of vignettes and interweaving plot lines and characters that deal with love in all its messy permutations. As with most of these types of films, some of the story lines are more engaging and effective than others, and its sprawling nature comes across like a substandard Altmanesque feature.
The film has been co-written by Karen Fulgate, who also penned what most fans consider to be the best episode of the tv series Xena. Fulgate also manages to work a gay sub plot into this film.
Set in LA during Valentine’s Day, the various stories cover the gamut from youthful optimism and first love through to the painful disappointment of bitter experience. The various strands explore love, lust, love found and loves lost, break ups, and the pain of betrayal, and offer up a host of cliched characters.
The closest thing this film has to a main character is Reed (Ashton Kutcher), a florist whose presence provides a linking thread running through many of the stories. On his busiest day of the year he tries to prevent his best friend, prim schoolteacher Jennifer Garner, from making a mistake. She is having an affair with a handsome doctor (Patrick Dempsey), unaware that he is still married. We also get Taylor Lautner (from the Twilight series) and Taylor Swift as a high school couple blissfully and blindly expressing their infatuation for each other. Shirley MacLaine and Hector Elizondo play an old married couple who has been together for over fifty years. On the eve of renewing their wedding vows one of them confesses to an infidelity in the past which temporarily throws a spanner in the works. During a long flight, Bradley Cooper and Julia Robert briefly flirt with each other, before eventually going their own way. Jamie Foxx is a television reporter tired of covering fluff pieces, and is keen to make his name with a hard-hitting story.
Valentine’s Day features a star studded cast, and many of the performers here have managed to find a couple of free days in their hectic schedules to shoot their few scenes, and are obviously working for far less than their usual salaries. And some, like Kathy Bates, are wasted in small, thankless roles. The characters played by Foxx, Queen Latifah and George Lopez add (ahem) colour and ethnicity to the diverse range of characters. Anne Hathaway’s character of a secretary who also doubles as an “adult phone entertainer” is probably the strangest and most unlikely on offer.
The film also features a couple of clever in-jokes – one involves Lautner, and the other comes during the outtakes over the final credits when Roberts makes a reference to her iconic role from Pretty Woman. The first half of the film establishes the sketchily drawn characters and multiple plot strands and is a bit laboured, and may test the patience of some in the audience. However, the second half is breezier, and more enjoyable. Garry Marshall (Pretty Woman, etc) is a dab hand at this sort of lightweight romantic comedy, and although he handles the material proficiently enough he cannot avoid wallowing in excessive sentimentality.
**1/2