New Year's Eve is one film best left unattended

Does anybody watch or simply remember last year’s Valentine’s Day? If so, please preserve your memories by staying as far away from New Year’s Eve as possible. This overblown romantic comedy doesn’t deserve to stay in theatres this weekend, let alone until Dec. 31. It is a colossal pile of trash populated by a long list of performers who should have known better.

There are at least 30 well-known actors in this ensemble piece set in New York on Dec. 31, 2011. It seems like Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts are in it, even though they aren’t. The movie is set up with the same kind of intersecting plotline that Valentine’s Day had, but only better dramas like Traffic and Crash could accomplish without making the audience feel nauseous from experiencing too much syrupy nonsense.

New Year’s Eve features several separate stories about people in and out of relationships as they experience the emotional foibles of their love lives. Josh Duhamel crashes his car in a small town and can’t find a mechanic to fix it so that he can get back on the road to the Big Apple and reconnect with the mysterious woman he met exactly one year ago. Jon Bon Jovi is a popular singer named Jensen who is the star of a public concert but he won’t play until he reconciles with his amour Katherine Heigl who he proposed to and then immediately ran away from.

It goes on and on like this. Each snapshot vignette is entirely predictable and utterly abhorrent. The urge to gag becomes stronger and stronger with each passing saccharine moment.

Right after party pooper Ashton Kutcher tears down all of the decorations in his building’s hallway, he gets into the elevator with Lea Michele all decked out in a nice dress, looking like she’s got big plans for the evening.

Does anybody not see the impending ‘stuck in an elevator’ situation?

It’s like writer Katherine Fugate took all of the archetypal characters and scenarios straight from The Love Boat and made a feature movie out of it. Scratch that. She made two movies, because Valentine’s Day is exactly the same. This is so shamelessly self-admitted that in the outtakes shown during the end credits, one character jokingly gives birth to not only the DVD copy of Valentine’s Day, but also the Blu-Ray!

That one only seemed better at the time because at least it was novel. Now, we get the rehash. What’s next on her rĂ©sumĂ©? Black Friday – A Love Story? It could be about 300 couples that crash into each other over two hours while they play out all of their problems as they shop for cheap Christmas presents.

This is the sort of movie that should be universally reviled. It is a great heaping pile of schmaltz and drivel. It is genetically engineered to strike right at the heart of everyone’s lowest common denominator. It’s emotional manipulation at its worst. It has maybe three or four decent, respectable performers surrounded by Jon Bon Jovi.

What’s worse, the movie includes some foul and unpleasant scenes and lines of dialogue that no enlightened moviegoer should ever have to bear witness to. Two couples are in the maternity ward when discussion turns to how the lucky one that produces the first baby of the new year wins a monetary prize of $25,000. Before admitting the birthing moms, a front desk nurse exclaims, “May the best va-jay-jay win!”

Abigail Breslin, playing the daughter of Sarah Jessica Parker, tries to convince Mom that she’s old enough to go to Times Square by herself so that she can kiss the boy she likes from school. She achieves this in the least reasonable way: by lifting up her shirt. “This isn’t a training bra!” she proclaims loudly as she flashes Parker … in the middle of Grand Central Station. I’m sorry but didn’t anyone else see a little too much child pornography in this? I think if you want to make a populist film, it shouldn’t make everyone uncomfortable at the prospect of being complicit in criminal and anti-social behaviour.

Apart from all that, New Year’s Eve, which cost $6 million to produce, is also incredibly shallow and pedantic, ridiculous and trite. It represents so many things that are wrong with the world, and especially the entertainment industry.