Review: 'Valentine's Day' [F]

I'll spare everyone the courtesy of a formal review for Garry Marshall's Valentine's Day, which is nothing short of a putrid slop of manure. Unfunny and superfluously overlong, the film is just as sugary, phony, banal and unnecessary as the holiday that it takes its name from.

This is a towering work of vapidity, a celebrity gawking vehicle without an ounce of ingenuity or earnestness in sight. It blatantly confuses embarrassment for humor and the result is an uncomfortable sit - essentially a mix-tape of Hollywood starlets and "Grey's Anatomy" hunks doing stupid things for two hours.

Scene after scene, our broadly sketched characters are put through the wringer of the tough love, lust and unpredictability of Valentine's Day, until they conveniently and unnaturally find their footing, usually in the arms of another similarly minded and love-starved knucklehead. (Although at times, it seems that the singular objective of the film is to embrace interracial romance and teenage sexual abstinence.)

Valentine's Day isn't just a dull, cliched trifle, but an offensively witless and abhorrent package of celebrity starpower. It's the equivalent of getting a giant stuffed bear as a gift (similar to the one that a naive Taylor Swift receives) - it's gaudy and copious, yet insufferably fruitless and a pain to lug around.