New Year's Eve (2011)

New Year's Eve celebrates love, hope, forgiveness, second chances and fresh starts, in the intertwining stories told amidst the pulse and promise of New York City on the most dazzling night of the year.

New Year’s Eve is everything that is wrong with Hollywood. It takes six or so different plot points going and has them all magically intertwine and decide that is enough. They half-ass the stories, don’t even attempt to create characters and just film whatever they feel like filming. It’s lazy, pathetic, and worst of all trendy; I don’t think there is a more perfect example of how stupid human beings can be when you see films like He’s Just Not That Into You or Valentines Day pulling in big bucks. But it’s the start of a new year and thankfully the crowds were smart enough to even avoid this pile of trash that they tried to pass off as a film.

I won’t even get into the dozen of short stories they managed to throw together because they are all either terrible or are good enough not to be called awful. What I do want to mention is just how stupid this film to managed to be. First you have Hilary Swank playing a female, she’s clearly meant to be a male so don’t try and force her gender on us. Secondly, you have Sarah Jessica Parker not playing a horse; big mistake. Thirdly, you have an absurd storyline of a woman trying to complete a list of resolutions for the New Year and she just so happens to find the right guy to accomplish them all. What’s worse is it’s not even in the top 5 clichéd moments of the film. The absolute worst part of the film is when everything is going wrong and the ball is stuck in limbo, Swank’s character gives a speech and every single person in Time Square is standing still in silence as if they are grasping each word she spews out of her mouth, all the while wearing some product placed Nivea hats. There is just no way everyone would respond that way in that situation. Its so god damn annoying and in a film full of clichés, it’s the one that stands out to me the most because it’s the farthest away from reality.

The best part of this film has got to be its big name cast that includes Zac Efron, Halle Berry, Robert DeNiro, Seth Meyers, Jessica Biel, Abigal Breslin, that kid from the Disney channel, Michelle Pfeiffer, Aston Kutcher, Cary Elwes, Common, Katherine Heigl, Bon Jovi, Josh Duhamel, Ludacris, and Lea Michele. They somehow managed to not snag a single good working actor and instead settled with the names above. Real great job Gary Marshall; you managed to accomplish the great casting feat of paying dozens of people money to do absolteuly nothing.

If you’re a fan of Zac Efron, then A.) what’s wrong with you and B.) he gets the most and best screen time of the cast, so you should find it somewhat watchable. Otherwise turn and never look back on this trash.

Overall Score: 2/10