Valentine

This is about as generic as it gets.  Honestly I wasn’t even going to write anything but I sorta started this Valentine’s Day thing with the My Bloody Valentines and then I saw this and thought “fuckin’ Scream did this to me”.  I mean “damn, this is uninteresting.  My Valentine’s slasher shit isn’t panning out like I hoped”.  The problem is I don’t really have anything positive to say about this film and feel a little bad only rattling off negatives.  So I’ll try to be brief.

The story revolves around a group of once middle school girls who all individually rejected an awkward disheveled boy at a Valentine’s dance which eventually somehow led to him getting accused of sexual assault, soaked with punch and his clothes torn off by bullies, in front of everyone.  So that kinda fucked him up.  Over a decade later this group of friends, along with a few other folks, start to get picked off one by one.  Is it the same kid, now grown up, out for revenge?

Ok, first thing upfront is I don’t understand this casting.  Three of the four main character friends are broads with blonde hair and blue eyes and they all look exactly the same (Marley Shelton (Scream 4), Jesica Capshaw (Grey’s Anatomy), Jessica Cauffiel (Legally Blonde)).  Who the hell thought this was a good idea?  Casting actors with similar appearances is a big pet peeve of mine.  I had such a hard time figuring out which character was which in any given scene.  Something like this is an unforced error.  They could’ve had other slightly more diverse people in these roles.  Denise Richards (The World Is Not Enough), a brunette, plays one of the leads so that was easy to pick out but the rest were a struggle to tell apart.

3 lookalikes and Denise Richards

Each of these ladies is an asshole too which didn’t help.  Wait, scratch that.  Every character in this movie is unlikeable.  Whether air-headed, aggressively flirty, hopelessly desperate, self-absorbed, thoughtless, scummy, creepy, pompous, condescending, oblivious, scornful, it’s all here.  The only person who has any depth is one of the boyfriends who’s struggling with alcohol addiction and it feels like too serious a topic to throw in your shitty slasher.

Another unfortunate thing is the ending is pretty confusing.  I won’t spoil it (I don’t know why, no one cares) but the whodunit mystery doesn’t actually get explained.  Yea the mask gets pulled off at the conclusion but, and this is crucial, after the person is dead.  So we don’t get a motive.  Now to be fair there’s one last twist that helps a bit but it’s still not enough to tell us what we need to know.  Naturally there’s a deleted scene that ties all this up but the studio axed it because it tipped off the true identity of the killer earlier than they wanted.  Really though this sounds like it might’ve been a script problem that was simply never addressed until it was too late.

Forgot to mention Katherine Heigl is
also in this...she doesn't last long

They don’t take advantage of the Valentine’s Day theme either which is weird considering you know, the title of your movie is Valentine.  The only bits are the killer sends flowery cards with seemingly romantic poems that then turn gruesome with the last line and there’s a vaguely Valentine’s themed party towards the end but that’s it.  The villain’s mask is a cherub with a chubby child face and blonde curly hair but the rest of the outfit is a black trench coat, black pants and black boots.  The filmmakers must’ve known the design wasn’t obvious so they have the characters mention the cherub or cupid thing a couple of times.  I couldn’t figure it out either.  I thought it was just supposed to be a fat baby.

Other shit like the editing (location hopping isn’t always clear), character relationships (the four mains are best friends yet they never seem to know what’s going on in each other’s lives) and the hard rock industrial White Zombie/Nine Inch Nails type soundtrack are bad too.

Sorry movie, I don’t want you to be my valentine.