New Year's Eve (2011)
OK, it’s a bit inception-y to review a movie called New Year’s Eve for…New Year’s Eve, but it’s also really, really tempting because it’s a target of opportunity and all that stuff.
Zoikes, though. Directed by Garry Marshall, the film follows several different story arcs, all set in or around Manhattan and all of which presumably culminate at the big ball drop in Times Square.
One’s about a minister who’s also the son of a wealthy family racing back from a wedding when his car breaks down. Another is about a mother whose teenage daughter wants to kiss her crush at midnight. Still another concerns a cute young guy helping a frowsy, nervous middle-aged woman check off the items in her To Do list Roman Holiday-style. Two couples compete to deliver their babies first after the stroke of midnight.
Meanwhile, a comic book artist gets stuck in an elevator with a woman who’s on her way to sing backup for the hot rocker who’s trying to patch things up with the chef he proposed to a year ago. Yet another story follows the woman who’s running the Times Square festivities, which all go wrong at the last minute, of course, while worrying about her dying father.
At the risk of being Captain Obvious. this is a frantically busy movie.
There are so many stars and character actors in New Year’s Eve that the viewer may fail to notice that the movie basically has no plot. Oh no, they’ll be too distracted by Yeardley Smith sitting across an RV dining table from Josh Duhamel or Robert De Niro playing opposite Halle Berry, Alyssa Milano, and Cary Elwes. And let’s not forget a frustrated Katherine Heigl slapping Jon Bon Jovi not once but twice. Or Zac Efron getting down on the dance floor with Michelle Pfeiffer.
New Year’s Eve garnered a whopping seven percent critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which isn’t the most reliable barometer for how good a movie actually is, but in this case it’s easy to see why it scored so low. While each one of these mini story arcs are fun on their own merits, although none of them are exactly original, the movie reads confusion. It can’t seem to decide if it wants to be an ensemble comedy or a group of vaguely intertwined shorts. Eliminating a few of the arcs or giving these characters more chances to interact with each other across their various storylines would have easily improved things. As it stands, we barely have time to meet them before we race to the next mini arc.
All the chaos makes the movie way too long as well, clocking in at an unwieldy two hours. All I could think about when I watched New Year’s Eve was that “The Limo” episode from How I Met Your Mother was so much better and hit all its story points in less than thirty minutes. Still, New Year’s Eve might be fun to run in the background while snacking and waiting for the ball to drop. If nothing else, we can be thankful our night is less crazy than these folks’.
Happy New Year, all!
New Year’s Eve is currently streaming on HBO Max. Rated PG-13.
My grade: C+
Principal cast: Sarah Jessica Parker, Josh Duhamel, Hillary Swank, Robert DeNiro, Halle Berry, Jon Bon Jovi, Abigail Breslin, Ashton Kutcher, Lea Michele, Jessica Beale, Carla Gugino, Michelle Pfeiffer, Zac Efron, Cary Elwes, Alyssa Milano, Yeardley Smith, Sarah Paulson, Seth Meyers
Directed by Garry Marshall.
Written by Katherine Fugate.