The Ups and Downs of 'Valentine's Day'

In case you're still on the fence about seeing Valentine's Day, here are some interesting points that you should know about. Be prepared for a few plot spoilers.

First of all, the film clearly focused too much on the number of stars that they cast rather than developing the plot. There were at least 15 big named stars in the two-hour movie, so if you do that math, that doesn't equal a lot of screen time for most of the people.

The film was supposedly meant to be similar to Love Actually only in Los Angeles on Valentine's Day, but when watching this film, I found myself constantly comparing it to Love Actually, and it didn't measure up.

The film focuses mainly on Jennifer Garner and Ashton Kutcher who are best friends. I felt that this was one of its real strong points because their dynamic was actually pretty good. In addition, Garner played a cute, bubbly, sweet character which is a role that she does well. Both of them were dating other people who were depicted in somewhat of a bad light which just served to emphasize the fact that really Garner and Kutcher were meant to be together. And what better day to realize this than on Valentine's Day?

If you've seen Love Actually, you'll know that one of the most loveable characters is Sam, the little boy who recently lost his mother and is suffering from problems with love. Valentine's Day also attempts to play to the audiences' heart with a child character, though it's not quite as good as Love.

However, Edison, a young boy in Garner's class, is a character who develops throughout the film, so even though he's a bit weak and annoying at the beginning, by the end of the film his scenes are some of the most fun and heart touching to watch as he struggles with living with his grandparents and a crush on his teacher.

The weakest part of the film, I think, is that which involves the high school students. The parts played by Taylor Swift and Taylor Lautner are totally unnecessary, and one can only guess that they were only inserted into the film so that the relationship between Emma Roberts and her boyfriend wouldn't stick out as much. Though I'm a huge fan of Taylor Swift, her character was so annoying that it was almost unbearable.

Being a fan of Grey's Anatomy, I was also hoping for more involvement of Patrick Dempsey and Eric Dane in the film. But to put it simply without giving anything away, Dempsey's character was probably the least likable and he really didn't have too much of a role. On the other hand, Dane's character drops a big surprise which I would have been totally shocked at had I not stumbled across the details before seeing the film, but he still only appears in a few scenes.

Julia Roberts, who really only appears briefly on a plane with Bradley Cooper, makes an appearance in what is perhaps my favorite scene from the film.

So, to sum it up, if you're into romantic movies, this film was decent. It had a lot of cute moments and an impressive cast which did help to make up for the lack of plot. If the movie had been longer, they would have had time to give each member of the large cast more screen time and maybe could have saved a lot of moments that seemed to go unexplained.