"Valentine's Day" a date to forget

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – For admirers of bonbons and Hallmark affect who ambition Valentine's Day lasted forever, Garry Marshall's 123-minute cine arrives like the acknowledgment to a prayer.

Taking its name from cupid's anniversary with all the aggressive adroitness of a filing label, "Valentine's Day" crisscrosses endlessly -- endlessly -- amid a Whitman's adornment of cutouts casual as characters.

Drawn by the starry casting and the film's congenital date-movie cachet, weekend admirers will accelerate box appointment adulation addendum to the New Line release. But the activity is acceptable to be brief as the absoluteness sets in that "Valentine's Day" is yet addition Hollywood adventurous ball that's all but bare of affair and laughs.

For the latter, audiences will accept to delay for the binding end-credit outtakes. Until then, they've got the antics of a agglomeration of witless, attractive Angelenos abnormally block or alienated l'amour. At the centermost of the multistrand adventure are Reed (Ashton Kutcher) and his best friend, Julia (Jennifer Garner). She's absurdly in adulation with a doctor (Patrick Dempsey) and added than a little afraid that florist Reed's career-gal adherent (Jessica Alba) has accustomed his bells proposal.

Popping the catechism on Valentine's Day, he believes, has accustomed him authorization to be a "sappy cheeseball" for the abutting 24 hours. That seems to be the allegorical assumption of Katherine Fugate's calligraphy as well, which subs awkward punchlines for barm and breeze and which spares about no one in the ensemble from face banalities about the means of the heart.

"It's Valentine's Day," Reed enthuses to Julia at one point. "You don't think; you aloof do."

Reed's anniversary boutique serves as the hub for abundant of the action. Amid those endlessly in to adjustment bouquets are a advanced fifth-grader (Bryce Robinson) and Julia's cheating boyfriend. The closing accident poses a bewilderment for Reed, which he hashes out with his right-hand man (George Lopez): Should he acquaint his best acquaintance the accuracy about the acceptable doctor? That's the abutting the blur gets to affecting tension.

Marshall's administration lends the actual little in the way of momentum, and John Debney's account grows added blubbery with schmaltz.

A brace of aboriginal kisses and a alliance that cap the blur are candied but hardly account the continued alley through scuffles, realignments and rapprochements that precedes them. A bounded sportscaster (Jamie Foxx) bristles at the Valentine's Day boner allotment assigned to him by his ambassador (Kathy Bates, almost there); he'd rather be block bottomward a adventure about a football brilliant (Eric Dane) whose career is in question. The athlete's arranger (Jessica Biel) prepares for her anniversary I Hate Valentine's Day party, and his activating abettor (Queen Latifah) puts up with a new agent (Anne Hathaway) who's off to a acceptable adventurous alpha with a adolescent agent (Topher Grace) -- except for the abstruse she's befitting about her cheating as a phone-sex operator.

From Julia Roberts' Army captain award a affection seatmate (Bradley Cooper) on her flight home, to the aerial academy babe (Emma Roberts) who's aboveboard scheduling a virginity-ending affair with her admirer (Carter Jenkins), cipher rings accurate except as a cine contrivance.

Music-biz It babe Taylor Swift makes her big-screen admission assuming it up as a ditz who's blubbering with admiration for her amateur admirer (Taylor Lautner), and a subplot involving Shirley MacLaine and Hector Elizondo offers a bit of cine love, if little else, with delirious close-ups from MacLaine's 1958 "Hot Spell."

Foxx and Grace survive with their banana timing intact, and Garner's inherent affability lends her role some charm. But this travelogue of Los Angeles landmarks, in which low-riders and Indian restaurants serve as "colorful" symbols of multiculturalism, is added valentine to the anniversary industry than a accurate adulation connection.