If you’re not aware of the film ‘Valentine’s Day’, then that’s probably a good thing.

Valentine's Day

I was warned against it before I went, but my lovely looking lady friend dragged me along anyway. I then had to endure almost two hours of good looking people ‘will-they-won’t-they’-ing before, you guessed it, ending up with ‘who they belong with’.

The film suffers from what I’m going to call ‘Love Actually Syndrome’. This essentially means that the plot deals with too many tenuously linked stories at once without delving into any kind of depth with any of them. At least in ‘Love Actually’ the characters sort of knew each other (if memory serves) but the problem for ‘Valentine’s Day’ is that even though the cast is stellar – Julia Roberts, Jamie Foxx, Ashton Kutcher, Jessica Alba, Anne Hathaway – their characters tend to be linked by coincidence, which, don’t get me wrong, has worked brilliantly in many films (‘Pulp Fiction’) but seems too contrived in a movie that is clearly as contrived as they come.

There are moments that genuinely warm the heart, especially the Julia Roberts story arc, but this only leads me to wonder why there were such extreme plot twists at the film’s climax, the sort that would make M. Night Shymalan blush with awkwardness – a feat hard to achieve. Bradley Cooper – a massive lad in ‘The Hangover’ – is reduced to a bit part throughout the film, only to be outed as some American footballer’s boyfriend or something towards the end. Needless to say, it was very confusing and seemed to occur just to wrap the story up in a nice little bow, i.e. everybody is safe and accounted for, now let’s end this shit!

The highlight of the film for me personally was twofold: The bloopers that ran alongside the end credits were brilliantly funny and I also got to spend time with a lovely girl. See, who says I’m not a romantic at heart!