As the name suggests, the movie focuses on that debated day – Valentine’s Day – and stars some of Tinseltown’s brightest, including Julia Roberts, Bradley Cooper, Jessica Alba and Taylor Lautner.
Valentine’s Day is another one of those ensemble comedies that Hollywood seems to be so fond of producing these days. I do not like ensemble cast films – they tend to split the focus of the movie away from the story and on to the seemingly random way that these people know each other, so that the audience spends most of the movie trying to guess if Jessica Alba is really Ashton Kutcher’s mother. Or something. Valentine’s Day is no exception. The story is skimmed over in favour of focusing on the pretty people and places and at the end you don’t really care.
As with the travesty that was He’s Just Not That Into You, Valentine’s Day has a central story that should have been the focus of the film, but instead it is confused and lost in the melée of all the other stories that are revolving around it. This story is the love quadrangle that is Jessica Alba, Jennifer Garner, Ashton Kutcher and Patrick Dempsey’s complicated story in the film. This story is somehow lost between Topher Grace, Anne Hathaway and cute little kid called Bryce Robinson.
At the end of it all, it seems that the writers of Valentine’s Day saw Love Actually and thought they could transfer the idea to a US produced film. Sadly, they couldn’t. The result is a tacky, predictable comedy that has Julia Roberts playing a soldier. I mean, please.
Avoid. Rent Love Actually instead.
Rating: 1/5
