Oh shit. Garry Marshall seems to have concocted a plan for his twilight years in the director’s chair: an annual collaboration with screenwriter Katherine Fugate and an army of celebrities wherein an already-overhyped holiday gets ground into saccharine mush. This one follows the same template as last year’s Valentine’s Day, with multiple rom-com storylines acted out by famous-but-disinterested actors, and somehow manages to limbo under the inch-high bar set by that debacle. There are no laughs. There is no genuine emotion. There is no evidence, save for a post-film outtake sequence, that any scene was attempted more than once. Every moment is utterly flat, the read-through quality performances of the onscreen talent matched by the laziness of Fugate’s script and Marshall’s direction. This has to stop before they ruin St. Patrick’s Day.
This article appears in Dec 8-14, 2011.