New Year’s Eve

Directors: Garry Marshall
Starring: Robert De Niro, Katherine Heigl, Hilary Swank
Time Out rating:

Director Garry Marshall continues his systematic defilement of society’s most romantic holidays with another rom-com built – and executed – like a ’70s disaster movie. Repeating the formula from last year’s Valentine’s Day, Marshall assembles an all-star cast (including [Deep breath] Hilary Swank, Michele Pfeiffer, Zac Efron, Sarah Jessica Parker, Seth Meyers, Sofia Vergara, Jessica Biel, Glee’s Lea Michele and many, many more) for a labyrinth of intersecting melodramas and love stories set in New York City on, naturally, December 31. But will the Times Square ball drop in time for midnight?!? No, that is not a joke; it’s an actual subplot.

The hypothetical advantage of such a massive ensemble is the assumption that, somewhere among the high quantity of characters, the odds are in our favour that there’ll be at least a few folks we actually like. Yet each sitcom-like plot thread is worse than the last: A welcome break from Katherine Heigl and Jon Bon Jovi’s interminable lovers’ quarrel simply means another unwelcome trip to the hospital to watch Halle Berry console a cancer-ridden Robert De Niro. It all adds up to a celebrity-obsessed city symphony played in one painfully flat key. The only remotely identifiable character in the bunch is Ashton Kutcher’s curmudgeonly comic-book artist who hates New Year’s Eve. Anyone who suffers through all 117 minutes of this movie will be able to relate.

New Year’s Eve opens nationwide on December 23