New Year's Eve - review

It's a bundle of different stories progressing during that day towards the moment when at midnight a big shiny ball drops in Times Square and people kiss and make resolutions. Some of these stories intersect, others don't. They're one and all the most shameless schmaltz though.

The director, Garry Marshall - previously responsible for Pretty Woman, The Princess Diaries and Valentine's Day but apparently still at liberty - has endeavoured to make the movie into a kind of para-party for the audience by stuffing it with big-name stars even in minor roles, so that you keep going "Oh look, there's ..." Or, in my case, keep becoming uncomfortably aware that there's someone you know you should recognise but don't.

Hilary Swank plays the nervous young exec charged with making sure the celebrations go off without a hitch. But there's a hitch! The ball gets stuck, going up. Only one man knows how to fix it, ever so characterful electrician Hector Elizondo, unfortunately just fired. Can he manage it in time?

Jon Bon Jovi plays pop star Jensen, hired to sing in the New Year, but having a crisis over his break-up with the hot blonde chef hired to cater for the party, Katherine Heigl. When they meet, she slaps him. But could they get back together by midnight nevertheless?

Ashton Kutcher hates New Year parties, due to a prior romantic disappointment. But just as he's taking the decorations down to the trash, the cutie pie killjoy gets trapped in a broken (but commodious) lift with his new neighbour, hottie singer Lea Michele. Could she be the one to change his mind?

Disappointed personal assistant Michelle Pfeiffer quits her job, the first of a long list of ambitious resolutions she has drawn up. Who can help her fulfil the rest in one day? Fun young bike messenger Zac Efron, that's who! And maybe by the end of the evening he (24) might even fall for her (53)?

In a nearby hospital, poor old Robert de Niro is dying, although strangely unblemished, his only remaining ambition being to see the ball drop one more time. Saintly babe Halle Berry nurses him but at midnight she must go off to Skype her hunky hubby soldiering abroad. Will the dying man's daughter turn up in time? Who could she be? Not someone we've already met?

Two funky young mothers-to-be are comically competing to win the $25,000 prize for the first baby to be born in 2012 (bit of a both-ends-of-life thing going on there, you'll notice - they think of everything). Who will win? Not the one who is Jessica Biel?

Enough already? There's more, much more. Teenager Abigail Breslin wants to be allowed out to snog her boyfriend but her anxious single mother Sarah Jessica Parker (the poet Philip Larkin really wasted the sobriquet "horse-faced dwarf" on the novelist Anthony Powell, didn't he?) won't let her. Or will she?

And tuxed-up dude Josh Duhamel has a midnight rendezvous, arranged a full year ago, with a woman who might just be the One but he has crashed his car in Connecticut. Can he make it? And who could she be?

By the time midnight arrives and Lea Michele has soloed on Auld Lang Syne (it should be forgot, it bloody should be, stupid question), you have abandoned all hope, for this is one of those unusual films that's more boring than life. And that's when they hit you with the sententiousness about love, kindness and second chances.

This may well be the most ruthless and cynical, not to say vicious, feel-good film ever made. You have to admire the product placement, though. Moët champagne you could expect. But the whole jubilant crowd in Times Square is also wearing big hats advertising Nivea.

New Year's Eve
Cert: 12A