Resolve to stop making movies like 'New Year's Eve'

Guilty pleasures don't get much more ignoble than 2010's Valentine's Day, a romantic comedy that followed two dozen or so characters, all played by famous Hollywood actors, implausibly falling in love in Los Angeles over the course of a single day. The storytelling was contrived, the comedy broad and knee-slappy. Yet as directed by that shticky old pro Garry Marshall (The Flamingo Kid, Pretty Woman) and performed by a cast of actors so impossibly good-looking that all you could do was submit (There's Julia Roberts! And Jessica Biel! And Bradley Cooper!), it illustrated a useful dictum: Not every movie needs to be Lawrence of Arabia, especially when you're home alone with a pint of Ben & Jerry's, and there's nothing else worth watching on cable.

Alas, lightning doesn't quite strike twice with New Year's Eve, which employs basically the same structure, a different holiday and a mostly new set of glamorous actors (Biel, Ashton Kutcher and Hector Elizondo are among a handful of carry-overs, playing different characters than they did in the earlier film). Yet this time the plot machinations are more belabored, the jokes even cornier -- and there's an unfortunate sourness to the proceedings that wasn't present before. Instead of practicing what it preaches, about the importance of being selfless and forgiving as the clock strikes midnight, New Year's Eve displays an unexpectedly Scrooge-like lack of generosity.

The central figure this time is Claire Morgan (Hilary Swank), recently appointed vice president of the Times Square Alliance, whose singular responsibility on New Year's Eve is to make certain the ball drops on schedule. But, of course, the lights in the ball get shorted, requiring the intervention of a brilliant electrician (Elizondo), and then the A-list musician Claire hired for the night (Jon Bon Jovi, playing a version of himself called Jensen) is having relationship troubles with his caterer ex-fiancee, who is busy in Brooklyn prepping a party for a prestigious record company whose scion (Josh Duhamel) is stuck in traffic.

Elsewhere, Kutcher, playing a cranky hipster, gets trapped in an elevator with one of Jensen's backup singers, played by Lea Michele; Biel and Seth Meyers compete with Til Schweiger and Sarah Paulson to see who will give birth to the first baby of the new year; and Robert De Niro lies in a hospital bed, playing the healthiest-looking terminal-cancer patient in history. With everything going on, it's little wonder that Sarah Jessica Parker and Abigail Breslin, as an overprotective mother and her daughter-who-just-wants-to-kiss-a-cute-boy, drop out of the proceedings for a good 45 minutes.

But even if you're willing to suspend your disbelief for the length of the film's baggy, nearly two-hour running time, it's hard to ignore the cynicism that underlies all of this. Poor Michelle Pfeiffer is forced to don a dowdy brown wig and an ill-fitting dress to play the cliché of the sad sack, middle-age secretary. Marshall has been trying to frump down this utterly radiant woman since 1991's Frankie and Johnny, and at this point, Pfeiffer would be well-advised to stop taking his calls. (Modest saving grace: She's cast opposite Zac Efron, who is swaggering and appealingly self-confident as the bicycle messenger who aids in making her assorted New Year's resolutions from the previous year come true; his is the closest thing in the movie to an actual performance.)

And whereas the first movie labored to present an all-inclusive vision of romance, one that included senior citizens (Elizondo, Shirley MacLaine), people of color (Jamie Foxx, Queen Latifah) and gay characters (played by Cooper and Eric Dane), this one sticks to a mostly white, mostly 20- and 30-something, uniformly heterosexual portrait of romance. When the best you can say for your film's portrayal of diversity is that you cast Sofia Vergara to play an even more exaggerated version of the overheated Latina sexpot she plays on Modern Family, you've officially dropped the ball.