Movie Review: "New Year's Eve" (2011)

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Movie: "New Year's Eve"
Director: Garry Marshall
Year: 2011
Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hour, 53 minutes

A look into the intersecting lives and relationships of many different people on New Year's eve.  

Garry Marshall's "New Year's Eve" is a film that tells the story of numerous different characters whose lives intertwine in one way or another on one day in all of their lives. These type of films seem to be habitual for director Garry Marshall, but we're not exactly sure why. The movie has tons of different characters, really far too many to list or give an in-depth description of in one review. Marshall brings together an ensemble cast including the likes of Ashton Kutcher, Jessica Biel, Hector Elizondo, Julia Roberts, and a slew of many, many other actors who may or may not be good elsewhere, but when placed in a movie with a terrible script, a cheesy premise, and a lack of any sort of feeling, are devoid of any and all chemistry and are unable to deliver their lines with conviction. Marshall even brings in a token musician into the fray, in this case Jon Bon Jovi, who has the acting ability of a flailing stick in the breeze (look, we love you as a musician, but stick to the music, your acting career is awful).

Like most holidays, there are those who hate New Year's eve and those who love it. Being about New Year's eve, the central theme is romance and relationships. The film looks into many different types of relationships, including a story about a pair of star-crossed lovers, a tale of unrequited love, the exploration of new relationships, and even sometimes unfaithfulness. There are at least some attempts at humor throughout the film, though most attempts fall flat on their face and are delivered in an awkward, unfunny manner by actors who are just not capable of making dreadful script writing sound even slightly decent. The characters and stories, from an execution standpoint, are so, so bad, and so, so contrived, and so, so boring. This makes this movie as a whole tedious, eye-rollingly stupid, and extremely difficult to watch. We don't care about a single character, we don't care about any of their problems, we don't want to see any of the solutions to their problems, and we just wound up being bored most the time as the minutes seemed to tick by ever so slowly. Since there's no real plot to this movie beyond a day in the lives and relationships of all these different, connected people, it has to rely on the dialogue spoken between characters and the performances given by the actors and actresses. Neither of these two things are even remotely good. The dialogue is cheesy, poorly written, and sloppily executed, and we know what's coming before the words are even spoken. The acting is either stiff or over-exaggerated, uninspired, and forgettable. "New Year's Eve" is ridiculously predictable, and we can't help but think we've seen this all somewhere else, but done in a better, more emotional film. It's called "Love Actually."

By the end of it all, we were so annoyed and insane out of our minds with boredom, we wanted to stick pencils in our eye sockets and ear holes to cleanse ourselves of what we had just witnessed. Garry Marshall, STOP THIS MASSACRE OF CINEMA!!!

My Rating: 2/10
BigJ's Rating: 2/10
IMDB's Rating: 5.6/10
Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 7%
Do we recommend this movie: AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE!!!
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One year ago, we were watching: "Love Actually."