By Ryan Broderick, Editor-in-Chief
Garry Marshall’s latest film “Valentine’s Day” is the newest addition to a long and horrible list of American “Love Actually” knock-offs. Centered on an over-stuffed cast of famous faces finding love or losing it in Los Angeles, it plays out almost like self-parody.
Marshall haphazardly tapes together different vignettes of pretty people doing pretty things, playing out almost exactly like you’ve seen them do before. “Valentine’s Day” is built from a rom-com Lego kit, pieces of love-struck romantic guy (Ashton Kutcher), naïve country boy in the big city (Topher Grace), high-strung professional cynic (Jessica Biel), philandering doctor (Patrick Dempsey), and the list goes on and gets even more sugary from there.
The movie curves and slowly chugs around the cast’s adventures on Valentine’s Day. And just like the actual holiday, their lives are cheap, commercial, and arbitrary and the general feeling is that neither Marshall nor the film’s screenwriter Katherine Fugate (who’s credits include TV shows “Xena: The Warrior Princess” and “Max Steel”) gives two s***s about them. Like almost every joke in the 125-minute sugar headache, plotlines fall flat and go nowhere.
But before launching headfirst into the horribly lengthy laundry list of problems with “Valentine’s Day” some things do need to be applauded. Almost like tiny bits of gold covered in mounds of crap, a few plotlines were terrifically nuanced and interesting.
Julia Roberts as a U.S. soldier returning from 11 months overseas was pretty ballsy—and wraps up very, very well. Eric Dane’s character was acted pretty poorly, Dane being one of the two Mc-doctors from “Grey’s Anatomy,” but had a lot of charm and a pretty surprising resolution. Anne Hathaway and Topher Grace’s storyline was also kind of neat if only for Grace just playing Eric Forman from “That 70’s Show” and Hathaway being a really great actress (who also seemed like she was paying Marshall a favor in starring).
But when it boils down to it “Valentine’s Day,” a scene involving Taylor Swift and Taylor Lautner best sums up its problems. The two tween-megastars are talking to a cameraman doing a man on the street piece about young love. Swift is doing a cringe-worthy job of being “the popular girl” and Lautner is flexing and looking no high schooler I’ve ever seen. They start making out and Swift says, “I love it. I love hype.”
And that’s exactly what “Valentine’s Day” was, just a big, steaming pile of hype. Do yourself a favor, find a copy of “Love Actually” and actually fall in love. At least that way you won’t feel bad that there’s not traces of the cleaned up and bizarre idea of love that’s strewn about in “Valentine’s Day.”

Jessica Alba and Ashton Kutcher play opposite each other in Gary Marshall’s “Valentine’s Day” (Photo Courtesy of New Line Cinema)