What with Valentine’s Day and now New Year’s Eve, ancient Director Garry Marshall seems to be going through the calendar to see which special occasions he can ruin with awful romantic comedies. What next, Remembrance Day: The Blind Date or Boxing Day: The Day After Christmas Day? The question has to be asked is; what can a walking corpse – who thinks that people still like Jon Bon Jovi – tell us about romance in the twenty-first century?
Garry Marshall’s new movie has a massive cast list of yesterday’s heroes (De Niro, Pfeiffer, Milano, Berry) looking for an elusive hit mixed with stars who didn’t really need to dumb to this depth (Heigl, Biel, Meyers). So, who does what? Here goes. Swank plays a nervous city executive who’s job it is to make the famous Times Square ball fall at midnight, Pfeiffer is an obnoxious woman with a bucket list to complete, Biel is heavily pregnant, Kutcher is some kind of New Year’s Scrooge, Heigl is a chef with a broken heart, De Niro is a terminally ill patient who wants to see the Times Square ball one last time and much much more.
New Year’s Eve is so similar to Valentine’s Day that it’s impossible not to keep comparing the two. Marshall hasn’t learned that less is more and he crams in about a dozen story lines and over twenty-five ‘main’ characters as the viewer is confused and driven to boredom by the tasteless buffet on offer. It resembles a disaster movie as each of the characters are introduced and, to be fair, it just turns into a disaster of a movie. He’s also cynically tried to win support from the troops again by including a soldier in the plot.
Is it worse than Valentine’s Day though? Well, yes it is. At least VD (more deadly than the sexual disease) had a few brave moments and the characters’ lives intertwined in some semi plausible way at it’s climax. This is just saccharine nonsense with no redeeming features. Garry should give up and start playing bingo.