Review of New Year's Eve (2011) by Michael T — 12 Dec 2014

As cool as it tries to be and despite the cast's fun filled performances, New Year's Eve fails spectacularly in it's own and it's cast rights, proving that once again, lame rip offs of Love Actually freaking sucks.

The film, which sarcastically opened in mid December, tells the story of a bunch of famous people, falling in love. While it maintains most of it's wits and charms, the stories were surprisingly dull and Valentine's Day stuffed into one freakin film (the best to the worst placed in order): a delivery man working on New Year's Eve for a woman who has quit her job in order to achieve the full New Year's Resolution (which is by far the best story); the Vice President of Time Square stuck in a ball drop, which somehow stopped working, but eventually does, and she remembered her father, who is in the hospital, played by Robert De Niro and talking non sense with Halle Berry (emotional, but unstable); the rest of the story failed purposely because it tried to be good: Two couples compete each other for a chance to win the prize for the first baby born in New Year's; A famous musician trying to reconile with his ex in order to have the New Year's Redemption; a guy who tries to make it to an exact place in order to meet his old spark on New Year's Eve... But by far, the worst would be Abigail Breslin's coming of age underdeveloped story, with a god awful performance from Sarah Jessica Parker, who, identically is the old spark of the guy mentioned earlier. Cause f*ck you, we're American rip offs of Love Actually.

The film, if a little bit more self aware, could have been a medium sized rip off of Love Actually. But instead, it had to, it had to, hire a great ensemble cast, producing characters whose problems we cannot care less about, not even mentioning their names, with a dull and shallow script, praised by god awful editing and a painful 117 minutes run time.

The casting was mostly solid, especially the likes of Michelle Pfeiffer and Zac Efron (except for the irittating Abigail Breslin, ran out of fame Sarah Jessica Parker and lame, dull Ashton Kutcher), but their performances was clearly unjustified. We could barely remember the names of the characters, we couldn't care about their idiotic problems and predictable solution, and we couldn't stand a great cast being wasted down the drains just because it was directed by Garry Marshall. I mean, even Jon Bon Jovi couldn't save this film. It's that bad. It did offered emotions, but that was just the hospital story, and little more. Valentine's Day, at least brought some self aware and decent charm into it's character, which New Year's Eve forgot.

A god awful film, and I would recommend to stay away from it during Christmas. 10/100.