New Year's Eve

Right now, you need to make a decision. If you continue to read this review, you may hate me by the end. You have been warned.

Congratulations! New Year's Eve might hold the record for wasting the talents of more Oscar nominees and winners than any movie before it. Halle Berry. Robert DeNiro. Michelle Pfeiffer. Abigail Breslin (Little Miss Sunshine is all grown up!). Hilary Swank. How was Cuba Gooding, Jr. not available to play a supporting role?

Much like director Garry Marshall and writer Katherine Fugate's earlier movie, Valentine's Day, New Year's Eve follows the troubles, travails and turbulent twists and turns in the lives of many New Yorkers on New Year's Eve. Of course, everyone has a plan, but those plans are falling apart.

Elise (Lea Michele) loves the holiday and is off to the chance of a lifetime, when she gets stuck in an elevator with Randy (Ashton Kutcher), who hates New Year's Eve (Because he read the script? Ouch!)

Stan Harris (DeNiro, and I cried one, manly tear down my unshaven cheek when I saw him in the commercials) is a man with one more day to live who hopes to see the ball drop at Times Square one last time, and finds himself comforted by a kind nurse, Aimee (Berry).

Ingrid (Pfeiffer) is a lonely, miserable lady with a list of New Year's resolutions she wants to make happen, and Paul (Zac Efron) is the bike messenger willing to help her.

And so on and so forth and so on and it just doesn't end!

New Year's Eve is overloaded with too many tiny, inconsequential stories that are extremely predictable and full of overly simple pratfalls and resolutions. I should have left the theater as soon as Pfeiffer's character fell into a pile of garbage bags. It was a sign of what was to come. Then, seeing how the rest of the band abandoned Bon Jovi and let him make this movie on his own, was a reminder that even Richie Sambora has standards (Standards exceeding those of Mr. Robert DeNiro, which brought on another tear).

This is not a movie looking to explore real emotions or difficulties. It's full of cute, innocuous, broad, cheap emotions. Marshall even brings out a puppy in one scene to score the easiest points since the Jets ran up the score on the Redskins last week.

Sure, there is a place for simple movies that deliver happy endings, but New Year's Eve is so cloying it engenders the exact opposite reaction intended. It's overkill. I love Marshall, but he is delivering a movie steeped in the 1960's and 1970's sit-com timing that made him a legend, but feels out of place in the year 2011.

Pfeiffer and Sarah Jessica Parker are even more out of place. Try as the makeup crew might, it's hard to imagine Pfeiffer as a dowdy woman who regrets life. She was cast because she has the very recognizable name, when someone else could have filled the role more believably.

Then, we have Parker playing an extremely age inappropriate character (and I think this is in her contract for every movie as it seems she is always playing a character 10 - 15 years younger than she is). I am willing to believe she is the mother of a teenager in New Year's Eve, but when you see who ends up playing her brother and who ends up being her love interest, you will laugh as hard as the people in the theater with me, and it wasn't laughing for joy.

New Year's Eve has inspired me to stay at home sitting on the couch and eating Ben and Jerry's brownie cheesecake this year. However, I won't be watching Ryan Seacrest, since he, too, is in New Year's Eve.

New Year's Eve is rated PG-13 for language including some sexual references.