This movie is dog shit. I hate to start off the new year with such a bad movie, but here it is. [I’m using today to clear out some of the movies that I technically saw last year but haven’t gotten around to reviewing yet.]
What Works: Nothing. This movie is one of the absolute worst of 2011. Zach Ephron and Michelle Pfeiffer’s storyline is the best of the roughly 15 in this movie, but it still probably couldn’t sustain a movie all its own. I appreciate Ephron trying to breathe a little life into this thing, but it’s pointless. This movie is even worse than “Valentine’s Day” even though it uses the same formula of no screenplay+lots of stars=big opening weekend box office and a fuck you to all those who paid to see it.
What Doesn’t Work: As you might have figured out by now, I didn’t like this movie (I have to remember to quit making these reviews so subtle). It’s a train wreck from beginning to end, with an “all star cast” of people known for making shitty movies (Sarah Jessica Parker, Josh Whatshisface, Ashton Kutcher, Katherine Heigl, Ludacris, Bon Jovi, Zac Ephron) that team up to make a mega-shitty movie. Then they rope in the always-ready-for-a-paycheck Robert Deniro and Hillary Swank (who should know better after a certain dictator’s birthday party) so it doesn’t look like a cast of hacks. There’s nothing remotely surprising or interesting about this movie, and that’s completely baffling to me as New Year’s Eve is one of the most surprising holidays out there. I’m not sure how you make the “wildest” holiday of the year look robotic and completely inorganic, but this movie did it. So bad, it’s vaguely dehumanizing in that no character gets more than one trait for the entire movie.
What I Would Have Done Differently: Rather than write a hundred paragraphs about how this movie could have been better and what it did wrong, I think it’s more helpful to take this film, store it, and use it to show future film school classes all the ways a movie can go wrong if people are making it solely for money.