Valentine’s Day 2/4
(Warner Bros., Rated PG-13)
While Valentine’s Day is allegedly the busiest time of the year for the delivery of mushy messages and corny love trinkets, the same should never be the case in a movie. Hyperactive in the extreme while negotiating an endless assortment of crisscrossing plot lines between way-too-cute celeb cameos, geriatric infidelity and worse, Garry Marshall’s Valentine’s Day is skits-ophrenic moviemaking when less would have been much more.
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Where do we begin? It’s Valentine’s Day morning in LA, and shy guy florist deliveryman Reed (Ashton Kutcher) wakes up extra early to propose marriage to ambivalent girlfriend Morley (Jessica Alba), who seems to be more attached to her cell phone—literally—which means Reed has to figure out just how to pry her fingers loose from the notoriously addictive gadget in order to find that spare finger for his engagement ring.
Jamie Foxx (L.) and Ashton Kutcher in Valentine's Day
On another side of town, Kelvin (Jamie Foxx) has just been demoted from TV news anchor to puff pieces and human interest holiday stories. To stimulate the sagging ratings, the weathergirl tap dances and Kelvin heads out to cover a press conference at which a famous athlete will announce he’s gay.
Elsewhere, giddy grade school teacher Julia (Jennifer Garner), who is otherwise fairly luckless in romance, daydreams between classroom lessons about her crush on a possibly too-good-to-be-true affectionate physician. This while a more sensible and stern army captain (Julia Roberts) shares a plane ride with a stranger, and that’s who will actually have the last word in wrapping up this overly crowded scenario that seems less like a smoothly paced script than a rush hour traffic jam.
But there’s more. Also getting in on the act for some comic relief is Jessica Biel as an unconvincing sad sack who can’t get a date; as a frantic Anne Hathaway appears to be revisiting her persecuted workplace drudge character in The Devil Wears Prada, with Queen Latifah seemingly preempting Meryl Streep, doing The Devil Wears Plus-Size Prada.
And while Hathaway moonlights on the sly during work hours as a phone sex operator to make ends meet and pay for health insurance and outstanding student loans, her dirty talk conversations are so lame PG that the actual phone sex industry may end up losing business. One saving grace—Queen Latifah’s boss from hell’s secretive impulse to move in and take over Hathaway’s seductive operation couldn’t be funnier, and saves this collaborative mayhem from looming movie overkill.
