Valentines Day
I don’t know why I keep doing this to myself. Reading the credits of Valentine’s Day at the start of the film is like witnessing a who’s who of mediocre, lack-lustre, mass produced, carelessly created, consistently underachieving cinematic nightmares that are loosely marketed at the cinema going public as ‘rom-com’. And not only that, but we also have exponents of the same art that haven’t even been quite as awful. Julia Roberts and Patrick Dempsey have both been pretty good at it, let’s be honest about it, so you do have to wonder what they hell they are doing here.
Add Ashton Kutcher and Jamie Foxx to the mix and you are left wondering firstly where Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson were when they were casting and secondly, if you could really manage to get through the entire horrible, nasty business without killing yourself or possibly even your date for the evening of hastily chosen entertainment and possible food poisoning for afters. Well, at least Kathy Bates and Hector Elizondo were in it. So maybe there was some hope, after all.
And this is all before Kutcher and Alba wake up.
This is as much of a production conundrum as ‘He’s Just Not Into You’, in that you continually are left asking why they bothered. It is not memorable for any other reason than it’s unbelievable casting which suggests that Garry Marshall either really has a lot of good friends (Elizondo and Julia Roberts especially) or that they planned to make an absolute bucket load of cash in order to pay for all the fees that such a cast list would inevitably incur.
Overall, a harmless foray into romantic comedy which neither stretches nor moves the viewer to any great extent, but fulfils a business window of opportunity for creators and cast alike. Not worth watching, if I’m honest, and not too taxing either if you are forced to sit through it.
Valentine’s Day falls foul of the ‘too many cooks’ problem. When you have such an admittedly amazing line up of stars all in one place, can you really do the film justice? With all the jostling for screen time and infrequent visits to each sub-plot, the film can only really fail to live up to any of its cast’s talents. Admittedly, not all of the stars in question really have the talents required to even be present, but those that do really fail to make a connection with the audience due to the woeful lack of character development. Even those stories within that have somewhere to go and something to say are really lost in the mire of toothless, mute, predictable pointlessness that makes up the greater percentage of the film.
The film follows the lives of a myriad of couples and singles on this day of days (which seems, like Halloween, to be made far more of a fuss of in Beverly Hills than anywhere else) and deals with the heartbreaks and delights of being involved or alone.
As I’ve mentioned, the film is horribly cluttered due to the nature of its star billing and cannot help but suffer for it, but if you add the saccharin-coated script and cutesy delivery, you really have something that will not test the audience any further than how long they can stay awake for. That seems to be a plan from the outset, delivering a date movie on the most marketable day of the year outside Christmas with little or no value to warrant its existence, save as an unimaginative option for boyfriends the world over to be forced to unwittingly sit through.
PCS Social Media
PCS Bitesize
Site Design
About Us
All Rights Reserved - Content copyright of the respective authors. Do not distribute.
