With the utter glee critics have taken in brutally destroying Valentine's Day in print, you'd think it was the second coming of Gigli. Entertainment Weekly gave it an F, Peter Travers called it "the date movie from Hell," and Manohla Dargis said its only saving grace comes from making Love Actually look good in comparison (a rather backhanded compliment for one of the best date movies ever made). Against all of that critical hatred, I find myself in the rather odd position of trying to defend a movie I didn't particularly like. Valentine's Day may be a predictable and painfully cliched romantic comedy, but it's hardly an affront to human decency.
Now, when I first heard of Valentine's Day, I thought what many of you must have: "An American Love Actually! Nice!' And that was certainly the idea, as not only does Valentine's Day take the same format of individual love stories with somewhat connected characters, but it even rips off some of the same plots. When you see a young boy who's recently been separated from his mother seek advice on how to woo a girl from school, it's hard not to think of Liam Neeson and "All I Want for Christmas." But in execution, this version is less a cultural translation and more of a straight-up advertisement for the Valentine's Day holiday.
For all of Love Actually's cutesiness, each and every one of the individual love stories was clever and something different. A prime minister who falls for a servant. An English man who falls for a non-English-speaking Portuguese woman. Porn stars who fall in love during film shoots. A rock star who realizes his closest relationship is with his agent/business manager. All individually interesting stories that, when put together, form a filmic mosaic of all types of love. It's hard to watch that movie and not feel good.
What does Valentine's Day have? A florist (Ashton Kutcher) who realizes he's meant to be with his best friend (Jennifer Garner). Said best friend realizing her boyfriend (Patrick Dempsey) is married. An agency mail room guy (Topher Grace) whose new girlfriend (Anne Hathaway) secretly works at a phone sex hotline. An older man (Hector Elizondo) who learns that his wife (Shirley MacLaine) hid an affair years earlier. A publicist (Jessica Biel) who hates Valentine's Day until she gets the attention of a sports reporter (Jamie Foxx).
Does any one of those storylines seem like something you haven't seen a billion times before? Ok, fine, maybe the phone sex. But otherwise, the individual stories here make up an impressive cross-section of the most obvious romantic plots possible. I think I can say that literally every romantic comedy cliche is utilized to some extent. The very public reunion that leads everyone to clap? Check. The minority best friend who offers sage advice? Check. Talking your way through airport security to stop someone from getting on a plane? Check. And enough nauseating lines about love that I actually left the theater with a headache? Check a hundred times over.
On a rather more specific note, I'd like to point out Taylors Swift and Lautner for carrying the most extraneous subsection of the movie. Unlike everyone else, they actually have no plot of their own. There's one scene where he doesn't love her V-Day gift and you think that's going to be the story, but nope, never brought up again. Instead, they pop up randomly around other characters while sporadically hogging screentime so Lautner can do backflips and Swift can do what seems to be a 40 year old's idea of how high schoolers act. Seriously, she was just there like a year ago, has she forgotten so soon?
Still, despite all of what I've said, I do think the critics miss one important thing: the movie's still pretty watchable. Sure, in the last half hour (which drags on waaaaaaaaay too long) the cheese factor gets too much to bear, but until then the movie is a painlessly mediocre experience. Even when given nothing to do, likable stars do go a long way. Anne Hathaway, Jennifer Garner, Bradley Cooper, Topher Grace - all people I'm willing to watch do otherwise stupid things. Even Ashton Kutcher as the de facto lead didn't bother me as much as usual (and goes the longest you will ever see him away from Twitter).
Obviously Valentine's Day is a movie that hinges on its title and release date, script be damned. But what else was I supposed to take my girlfriend to on Valentine's Day? The Wolfman? No thanks. Nobody else stepped up with a smarter romantic comedy, so Valentine's Day gets to carry the weekend. And I should also point out that I'm hardly the target audience here. My theater was pretty evenly split between couples and large groups of girls, making the male proportion of the theater about 15-20%. Women who enjoy watching these cliches over and over again probably had a perfectly good time. For the rest of us, we'll just enjoy the real Love Actually all the more next time we see it.
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