In Theaters: Valentine's Day

As this season's gift to the lovelorn, Valentine's Day rates somewhere between a pink carnation from the boss and the off-label SweetTarts left out in the break room: nothing personal is offered or gained and you really have to work to enjoy it. Expanding the laughably low concept they last applied to He's Just Not That Into You, rom-com scientists Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein squeezed even more big names (19 are above the movie poster's title) into another set of vaguely interlinked tales of love gone wonky. The A-list overkill yields at least one interesting result: in the quest to cover every demographic and circumstantial cliché, director Garry Marshall and screenwriter Katherine Fugate may have made the first romantic comedy for the ADD generation.

Set over the course of one day in Los Angeles, the film uses a flower emporium owned by an affable dude named Reed Bennett (Ashton Kutcher) as its narrative hub -- almost all the characters will either pass through or receive a delivery from the store. Reed's schmoopy wake-up proposal to his girlfriend (played by Jessica Alba) in the film's opening minutes is the first staple in what will come to seem like a frenzied game of rom-com Bingo; soon enough we can check off engagement, meet cute, infidelity, wise Latino, ethnic queen, sad single girl, workaholic bachelor (two of those, actually), adorable sex worker, one-night stand, cute old couple, puppy love, and teenaged boning. Once all 19 characters are introduced and a few cross-pollinated, rejoining one plotline or another begins to feel like a sweaty exercise in flashcard cramming: Oh shoot, Eric Dane -- I know I know this! Oh, uh: football player! Might have to retire! Feels lonely and stuff!

Generally each character gets four or five brief scenes, one for each bullet point in their arc. Playing a temp who moonlights in phone sex, Anne Hathaway gets one scene to set her up as the nymph who just rocked Topher Grace's sheets, another to establish her eccentric side-gig, yet another to let her do it in a funny accent without knowing her boss (Queen Latifah) is listening, one more to have it all blow up her face, and of course the finale in which lessons are learned and everything turns out just grand. Many of the scenes have at least one enjoyable sound bite ("That's LA talking," Hathaway says, when Grace complains about his nose), and Fugate does pull off a couple nifty reveals and dovetails from an otherwise haphazard script. Still, what each storyline ultimately amounts to is a really jazzy trailer, and only a couple of those hold enough interest to sustain the story they are merely advertising. Bradley Cooper and Julia Roberts as seatmates with secrets on a transatlantic flight and Jennifer Garner and Kutcher as platonic friends with potential make more of their screen time, which only adds to the frustration when we flit from them to teenage vapids (Taylor Lautner and Taylor Swift) in vapid teenage love.

Particularly for a film meant to succeed largely on its merits as flimsy but good-natured fantasy, Valentine's Day is strangely lacking in the fizz and verve of a Marshall (and L.A.) classic like Pretty Woman. I am not above whimpering over Dane's impossible physique, gasping at Jessica Biel's ridiculous waist (if not her singleton publicist character, a candy-snarfing Cathy in Wonder Woman's body), or getting lost again in Hathaway's pudding-cup eyes, but if anything, the film falls short in such purely movie-star moments. Along with decent lighting and an editor schooled in the art of continuity, it seems a script fluffer wasn't included in a budget clearly blown on star salaries. Amid the grind to nail down 19 corners of a world where all but the low down find love on Valentine's Day, only one of the film's fantasies made my imagination soar: a sympathetic airline clerk (played by Marshall regular Larry Miller) who gives gratis tickets to the heartsick. But then everybody loves a free ride, who better than Garry Marshall and cast of coasting stars to remind us of that?