Valentine’s Day is coming up. Perhaps you noticed the heart shaped boxes of chocolate appearing on shelves late last year. Turns out, not even supply chain issues could stop the shops from heralding, in mid-December, the inevitable coming of Cupid. But I don’t want to talk about that Valentine’s Day. No, I would much rather discuss Valentine’s Day, Garry Marshall’s 2010 ensemble romantic comedy. Because I know that some of you out there—whether you’re single and looking for something appropriately seasonal to watch alone with a bottle of wine, or coupled up and looking for an at-home date night type movie—are going to consider watching this two-hour logjam of early 2000s celebrities on or leading up to February 14.
Don’t do it. It’s not worth it! Take it from me, I know, because I did watch Valentine’s Day, and lived to tell about it.
Valentine’s Day is ostensibly a riff on the Love, Actually formula: a lot of interconnected love stories that take place around a holiday. But while Love, Actually’s treacly smarm was cut with a bit of cozy Britishness, Valentine’s Day is a full-on high gloss, filler-injected Hollywood product. It literally takes place in Los Angeles and stars—deep breath—Ashton Kutcher, Jennifer Garner, Bradley Cooper, Anne Hathaway, Taylors Swift and Lautner, Jamie Foxx, Jessicas Alba and Biel, Queen Latifa, Patrick Dempsey, Eric Dane, George Lopez, Kathy Bates, Emma Roberts, Topher Grace, Shirley MacLaine, Héctor Elizondo and Julia Roberts. I think that’s everyone.
We open with some radio DJ telling us it’s Valentine’s Day, a holiday that is apparently extremely popular and meaningful to a lot of people, particularly in Los Angeles for some reason. I mean, this concept is extremely foreign to me, but I guess it rings true? Like, I accept that Valentine’s Day is thing in the same way that I accept that Des Moines is a real place even though I’ve never been there.
Anyway, it’s bright and early on Valentine’s Day morn, and Ashton Kutcher wakes up next to his girlfriend Jessica Alba and proposes. (A note: I will be referring to these “characters” by the names of the celebrities who play them as it is unreasonable for either me or the reader to keep track of who anyone is otherwise.) Ashton Kutcher thinks she says “Yes,” but actually she doesn’t. She actually just says, “Really?” and kisses him, still clutching her Blackberry, which she sleeps holding, which should tell us right away that there is something unnaturally unromantic about her. But, spoiler alert, Valentine’s Day is at least progressive enough not to punish Jessica Alba for this fundamentally inhuman character flaw, so that’s something.
Ashton Kutcher, however, is very romantic, because he is a florist. And his flower shop is apparently the nexus of all Valentine’s Day drama. For instance, he has this friend named Jennifer Garner who is sleeping with a very McDreamy man named Dr. Patrick Dempsey. She thinks she’s in love with him, but what she doesn’t know is that he’s married, which Ashton Kutcher learns when Dr. Patrick Dempsey comes in to buy flowers for both his wife and Jennifer Garner.
Elsewhere, Anne Hathaway and Topher Grace have just started sleeping together. They work in the same office where he is a naïve Midwestern transplant in the mailroom and she is a temp assistant, who also moonlights as a phone sex operator. She’s trying to keep that a secret from both her boss, Queen Latifa, and from Topher Grace, who, upon discovering it is Valentine’s Day, is trying to arrange an appropriately romantic date.
Queen Latifa is a sports agent whose main client is Eric Dane, a football player who has a big secret that he’s about to reveal. It’s that he’s gay. That’s the secret, which he announces at a press conference. And that’s pretty much all there is to Eric Dane’s storyline—although we do get to see him shirtless a bit, which is nice.
Eric Dane also has a publicist named Jessica Biel, who is experiencing some kind of totally proportional emotional crisis re: Valentine’s Day. Somehow, sports reporter Jamie Foxx finds this charming. See, his boss Kathy Bates assigned him to do a fluff piece interviewing random people on the street about V Day, but he’s ignoring that because why would you, a man, feel any kind of imperative to do what your female boss tells you to? Instead, he’s chasing down the Eric Dane thing, which is how he and Jessica Biel end up falling in love. Also, she throws an annual I Hate Valentine’s Day party, to which no one has RSVPed, which is a plotline totally lifted from the far superior ensemble New Year’s Eve movie 200 Cigarettes. I would suggest watching that instead, but you can’t because it’s not streaming anywhere and even the DVD is out of print. And yet, Valentine’s Day is on HBO Max for all the world to see. We live in a society!
Another storyline totally cribbed from another movie—this time Love, Actually—is that of wee sorrowful towheaded moppet Edison. His parents are absent for unexplained reasons, so he’s living with his grandparents Shirley MacLaine and Héctor Elizondo. But, actually, he’s not so sorrowful because of his possibly dead parents. He’s actually in love with someone at school and manages to con Ashton Kutcher into cutting him a deal on some flowers to impress his beloved, who turns out to be Jennifer Garner, his teacher.
Meanwhile, little Edison’s high school babysitter Emma Roberts is thinking about having sex with her boyfriend for the first time. But that goes off the rails when the boyfriend gets caught naked in her bedroom by her mom during their lunch period. Emma Roberts talks to Shirley MacLaine and Héctor Elizondo about this, and it comes out that Shirley MacLaine cheated on Héctor Elizondo a million years ago. Could this mean the end of their marriage?
Also, Taylor Swift and Taylor Lautner—who were maybe dating when this was filmed?—also go to Emma Roberts’s high school. But they don’t really have a storyline, which is lucky, because this was about the point when I thought if any more characters were introduced, I would start weeping.
Oh, god, and I forgot about Bradley Cooper and Julia Roberts, who have been sitting next to each other on an airplane this whole time seeming like they might be flirting and falling in love. Except they’re not, because twist! He’s gay and dating Eric Dane and she’s Edison’s mom. So, that’s them out of the way.
Ok, so: Jessica Alba shows up at Ashton Kutcher’s shop and dumps him. Then he tells Jennifer Garner that Dr. Patrick Dempsey is married, but she thinks he’s just emotionally manipulating her because he got dumped and she’s his emergency back-up girl. But now she’s suspicious, and so she goes to the hospital where Dr. Patrick Dempsey works and finds out where he and his wife are having dinner. She somehow manages, through her public school teacher connections, to convince the restaurant to let her pose as DPD’s waitress so that she can deliver a vivid monologue about dismembering a pig to him and his wife.
On their Valentine’s Date, Topher Grace finds out that Anne Hathaway does phone sex and gets all judgy about it because he’s from the Midwest. So, he goes to a movie in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery where he finds Héctor Elizondo moping. They commiserate, and then Shirley MacLaine appears wearing this very loud and red and sparkly shawl. She and Héctor Elizondo make up, which convinces Topher Grace to get over his boring provincial morality and go get Anne Hathaway.
Meanwhile, Jessica Biel is hosting her I Hate Valentine’s Day party at an Indian Restaurant. Jamie Foxx shows up and plays the piano and woos JB a little more, and then everyone has a Bollywood flash mob for no reason and the party is suddenly a huge success!
Later, Jessica Biel goes to the TV station where Jamie Foxx is doing his gross, kinda homophobic report on Eric Dane, and when that horror show is done, they kiss and are in love now. Jessica Biel and Jamie Foxx, not Jamie Foxx and Eric Dane, obviously.
So, while all that is going on, Ashton Kutcher is talking about love and heartbreak and whatnot with his delivery guy George Lopez—he’s in this too! And now that all his Valentine’s Day deliveries are done, he’s on a bridge somewhere throwing leftover roses in the water, when who should show up but Jennifer Garner! See, she had to turn down baby Edison’s marriage proposal or whatever and this made her realize that, actually, she loves Ashton Kutcher. So, here they are on a bridge, and they kiss and Valentine’s Day is over.
See what I mean? This movie is a mess! Like, if you thought this recap was confusing, I guarantee that watching the actual movie is only slightly less dizzyingly chaotic! But, after all that, if you still feel like you need to see Valentine’s Day…honestly, I’m not sure what to say. I’ve done my best to prepare you for what you’re getting yourself into. Go with god, my sweet cherubim! And a happy St. Valentine’s Day to us all!
