Okay, so it’s a little out of season.  But the folks out at Warner Brothers sent me a copy of Valentine’s Day to review, so I took it on.  You know me, folks, I’ll tackle just about any movie for your sake.

Valentine’s Day revolves around several couples in the midst of that grand season of tumult, excitement and horror…not surprisingly called Valentine’s Day.  And there’s a lot going on for these couples: secrets will be told or just plain old found out, proposals will be made, moves will be made, and there will be joy and pain enough for three.  Sometimes, there will be three.

The big problem with Valentine’s Day is it’s remarkably resistant to criticism.  If I call this “spectacularly dull”, despite the fact that it is, I’ll look like a jerk.  If I say that it’s got about twelve different plots because NONE of them has sufficient content to make its own movie, despite the fact that it does, I’ll look like a total jackass.  And if I say whoever thought this bilge up is making a cheap and cheesy attempt to exploit an already useless holiday for cash, despite the fact that that’s EXACTLY WHAT THEY’RE DOING, I’ll probably be lynched by the hordes of Taylor Lautner fans who couldn’t get enough of this high-pressure sludge being pumped at them at high velocities.

Valentine’s Day somehow manages to be both boring and wildly unfocused, leaping frantically from plot to plot to plot with occasional common threads integrating them.  It’s like someone fed a ferret a box of chocolates and had it run over the script, shuffling the plotlines around as it went.  It’s hard to imagine that something that’s clearly suffering from literary ADD could be so intensely, savagely narcoleptic, but thanks to the constant shifting of subplots, it’s difficult to find a connection to any one particular plot, and thus without that connection, the end result becomes slow and dull.

It’s impossible to care about these characters, because you spend so little time with each of them.  They’re strangers you meet at an office party–here one minute, gone the next.  They told you their names, but you really don’t care.

And since it’s so hard to care about the characters, there’s just not much to enjoy.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, thusly, gives Valentine’s Day a three out of ten thanks to its lone saving grace: the sheer unbearable awesome that is Anne Hathaway as a phone sex operator.  It’s hilarious and actually kind of hot, but then, I’m biased.  Aside from that, sadly, there’s not much going on here.