“Valentine’s Day” was not necessarily bad, but it certainly wasn’t anything special. The structure of the storytelling was somewhat compelling, but turned into a confused, mangled excuse for a plotline as the filmmakers struggled to tell six or seven different stories at once.

The cleverest move the film made was centering the plot around a florist—on Valentine’s Day.

Now that’s interesting, almost poetic. Yet, it was impossible to sympathize with a character played by the laughable, blundering lump of uninspired flesh that some refer to as “Ashton Kutcher.”

The Kutcher problem was symptomatic of a far greater ailment. Start looking at the cast—Kutcher, Anne Hathaway, the two hottest Jessicas in Hollywood, Patrick Dempsey,

Jamie Foxx, and about ten other A-listers—and you realize that more was spent on casting than production. Just as an aging businessman uses a shiny car to compensate for his deficiencies, so does “Valentine’s Day” compensate for its deficiencies with shiny, happy people.

Of these deficiencies, perhaps the most glaring was the utter lack of any consistent meaning. Some of the subplots added absolutely nothing to the film as a whole. The Taylor Swift-Taylor Lautner union makes it painfully obvious that the film is simply trying to hit as many audience demographics as possible. In that sense, the film is a perfect example of profitable pop culture at its pettiest, but those admirable few looking for an illuminating exegesis on love would have more success reading Valentine’s cards in the supermarket

By far, the greatest parts of the film were storylines about the football player, the airline gentlemen and Julia Roberts’ character. In fact, the movie probably could have subsisted on these two subplots alone. Instead, it draws connections between 12 or more major characters, transforming the potentially charming stories into a baffling mess. But at least with the all-star female cast, it’s a hot mess.