REVIEW: 'Valentine's Day' Will Break Your Heart

Perhaps more than any other holiday, Valentine’s Day is a love-it-or-hate-it proposition. Unfortunately for prospective moviegoers, the new movie “Valentine’s Day” will provoke a universal sense of disappointment and dread.

Packing 19 name actors from diverse age groups (high schoolers through grandparents are followed) into a series of intertwining vignettes set on the titular day, and topping it all with direction by the legendary rom-com master Garry Marshall (“Pretty Woman,” “Runaway Bride”), “VD” (an acronym that sadly reflects how unpleasant the viewing experience winds up being) should be an instant classic along the lines of 2003’s vastly superior “Love Actually.” Unfortunately, the filmmakers spent so much time negotiating with actors that they forgot to find a script with characters worth giving a hoot about.

All the action (or actually, lack thereof) takes place across a vast swath of Los Angeles, as we follow the travails of the only straight male florist in movie history (Ashton Kutcher) on his busiest day of the year. He’s floating on cloud nine because he just slipped an engagement ring on his live-in girlfriend (Jessica Alba) before hitting the streets, and is now excitedly jabbering about how thrilled he is to get married – behavior that Kutcher handles appealingly, yet which almost seems like it belongs in a science-fiction movie rather than anything based in earthly reality for a normal dude.

The other characters and their stories all come into play via various flower orders that are left, picked up or delivered from Kutcher’s shop. That’s a conceit that should be more fun than it actually is, but most of the characters have so little screen time that they barely register. Instead, we are left with “types” or people defined solely by their jobs: a doctor (Patrick Dempsey), a schoolteacher (Jennifer Garner), an agent trainee (Topher Grace), a receptionist who moonlights as a phone-sex operator (Anne Hathaway in a role that veers between funny and embarrassing, but at least she stands out) and a TV sports reporter (Jamie Foxx) stuck asking average Joes and Janes about what Valentine’s Day means to them while chasing the bigger scoop of whether a star football player (Eric Dane) will retire.

Exhausted yet? Imagine that I’ve not even touched on 11 of the other characters played by stars ranging from George Lopez to Shirley Maclaine to the Two Taylors (Swift and Lautner). Yet despite the fact that whites, blacks and Latinos are amply covered, there are apparently no Asian people in love in all of Los Angeles.

The only two actors to register at all aside from Kutcher and Hathaway are Julia Roberts and Bradley Cooper as strangers on a plane who share what seems like a flirtation, but whose storyline actually plays out differently and far more clever and touchingly than you’d expect – especially after enduring the utterly generic antics of the other characters in this stultifyingly long (125 minutes!) movie.

I’m a sucker for good romantic comedies, and I even found some appeal in “Leap Year” despite its abundance of cliches. But I laughed so few times at “Valentine’s Day” that I actually took to keeping count, like a prisoner marking his days off in his cell. The end tally? I laughed out loud six (6) times in 125 minutes – five of those for one-liners, and one series of chuckles and maybe a guffaw in the one truly funny and spirited scene in the movie, which seemed to be an outtake from “American Pie” rather than a coherent part of this movie.

The entire movie, from scene one to closing credits, feels like a bad Lifetime TV movie – as if there’s such a thing as a good Lifetime movie. Well, lo and behold, the script (if you can call it that) is written by Katharine Fugate, the creator of that horrific network’s “Army Wives” series. The obvious question here is why would so many stars team up to make such a bland movie? And how so many people’s standards could be so low? Come on, Bradley Cooper just made one of the biggest comedies of all time with “The Hangover”! Did he have a lobotomy with that film’s paycheck?

The answer is, obviously, greed and laziness. All these people wanted to basically hang out for a couple days and be around the rest of the “cool kids” in Hollywood, while getting paid a few hundred thousand or a couple million each for what was likely at most three days’ work for each character. (That was another game I started playing to save my sanity – how few hours did each actor have to put into their roles?)

There are so many ways to show the person you love, or even dig, that you care for them this weekend. You can go to dinner, take a long walk in a pretty setting, sweep them off their feet dancing. Heck, you could even watch the Vancouver Olympics – because even without snow, that’s certain to be more exciting. But for the love of God and all that is holy, if you want your relationship to last, I suggest wholeheartedly that you steer clear of “Valentine’s Day.”