NEW YEAR'S EVE (PG-13 for the usual "sophisticated" vulgarities) is a very bad follow-up of director Garry Marshall's earlier "Valentine Day" caper, in which various people (many recognizable celebrity faces) are used with the theory that more is better - in this film they count down the hours until midnight, making resolutions, etc., etc.
Would you be enticed to see a movie that received such comments as:
- How is it possible to assemble more than two dozen stars and find nothing interesting for any of them to do?
- It is a cinematic equivalent of a greeting card: Both the sentiment and the laughs are plentiful, cheap and forgettable.
- Offering around a dozen barely there, aggressively agreeable mini-stories spliced together and spit out with lawnmower-style eloquence, the film is pushed to punishing lengths by the engorged cast list.
- It's about as appealing and effervescent as a flute of flat champagne.
- Marshall's direction imbues the film with the sweetness of a raw onion.
- It has plenty of plastic heart.
- It's as though Marshall and writer Katherine Fugate gathered together all the subplots from films that never got made or were left on the cutting-room floor in a horror of a holiday centipede.
No, I didn't pay to see it, either.