It’s hard not to be a bit suspicious of Garry Marshall’s ambitions in ‘Valentine’s Day’, a film about Valentine’s Day, released on Valentine’s weekend no less. A case of clever marketing or cynical ploy to extract cash from your wallet over the holiday season?
Valentine’s Day takes course over a single Valentine’s Day, as the current crop of who’s hot in Hollywood fall in love, fall out of love and have insightful, reverential conversations about the transformative power of love (just kidding on that last part). Reed (Kutcher) owns a flower shop though is unaware that he might be in love with his best friend, Holden (Cooper) and Kate (Roberts) sit next to each on a plane as they voyage home to their respective loved-ones, Liz (Hathaway) is dating Jason (Grace), though he’s unaware of her flirtations as a phone sex operator.
Some story arcs will have you wincing, some are quite effective. It’s unbearably schmaltzy, can an audience really relate to a film which has nothing new to say at all, and instead seems intent to display the impossibly beautiful and the impossibly wealthy at their most vacuous? There’s nothing here to engage the brain and it never feels charming, just all sickly sweet and ever so slightly manipulative. Performance-wise it’s all over the place, Roberts, Cooper and Dane all do a passable job with the weak material that they’ve been given, Lautner, Swift and Kutcher come off as irritating at best. Sadly, Hathaway, Grace and Alba just don’t have that much to do.
Criticism aside, there’s no second guessing Valentine’s Day. It’s a film that has no delusions of grandeur, or attempts to be anything else other than what it has set out to be. It breezes along its 125 minute runtime, there’s nothing here that’s going to offend anyone and some of the segments are actually quite poignant. It’s a film that will have some appeal to all ages, though its not something that’s going to linger in the mind once you walk out of the auditorium and in truth, you might just feel like you’ve been short-changed.
Jonny Dawson
