Couples, if you want to do yourselves a big favor, don’t take your boy/girlfriend to see “Valentine’s Day.” Keeping this one simple rule in mind is one big step towards keeping your relationship going. How could such an innocent movie about romance be THAT bad? Oh, let me count the ways.
There are several stories going on at once, so I’ll just try to give you some of the highlights. The most prominent of the stories involves Reed Bennett (Ashton Kutcher) as a florist. Now, keep in mind, this is all happening on Valentine’s Day, so his shop is quite busy. He and his good friend/co-worker, Alphonso (George Lopez), have a lot of deliveries to make. Meanwhile, Reed has recently become engaged to his girlfriend while at the same time finding out that another friend of his is in a relationship with someone she doesn’t know is already married.
Other side stories (though you could call every story in this film a “side story”) include an elderly married couple played by Hector Elizondo and Shirley MacLaine, Captain Kate Hazeltine (Julia Roberts) meeting someone on her airplane ride home to her special someone, and a younger couple played by Taylor Swift and Taylor Lautner. That begins to cover about half of the stories taking place throughout the entire film (and maybe about a quarter of the star-power).
Beginning to see the problem? This film has way too many stories going at once to allow any of them to develop. It bounces back and forth so much that we never even begin to care about any of the characters involved in any of the stories. It’s hard to tell what the writer, Katherine Fugate, was thinking when trying to cram this many stories into one film. However, many of these stories could have been their own terrible movie, so luckily she got them all out of the way in one go.
Another big problem is the runtime. The average romantic comedy is usually not that long. “Valentine’s Day” runs for nearly two hours, making you feel every minute of it and more. It feels as though it’s at least three hours long if not longer. It’s amazing that a screenplay with this many characters in this many stories could have absolutely nothing to say. It feels very stretched out, and when you stretch out nothing, you only get more nothing.
The film boasts one of the largest star-studded casts in recent memory including Jamie Foxx, Kathy Bates, Julia Roberts, Ashton Kutcher, Shirley MacLaine, Anne Hathaway, Queen Latifah, and so on and so forth. The question is, why would the filmmakers go to so much trouble to get so many big-name stars only to give most of them about five minutes or less on screen?
What we’re left with are tons of characters that aren’t even nearly half-developed. Perhaps if the filmmakers had chosen to concentrate on a given few and have a few big stars make cameo appearances, this film could have gone somewhere, but for some reason, they felt the need to try to keep all of these stories going at once, trying to make us care about every character, but ultimately failing.
The most probable reason why it feels so stretched out, aside from jumping from story to story, is the fact that we know what will happen to every single couple by the end of the film. Like in most romantic-comedies nowadays, there’s not one surprise to be found here. We’re merely left waiting for the inevitable conclusion. To put it simply, avoid a nasty breakup and look for romance elsewhere.
1.5/4 stars.
You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.