Avis Metacritic

New Year's Eve is dunderheaded kitsch, but it's the kind of marzipan movie that can sweetly soak up a holiday evening.

New Year's Eve is not unbearable. It's not bad, but it's not good, either. It delivers exactly what you expect: pretty faces, shallow romance and a mythical fanaticism about an event in a friendly Manhattan unblemished by hyper-vigilant security measures, obnoxious drunks or New York Jets fans.

Few of the plot strands connect to one another, much less resolve themselves with any degree of wit or daring.

It is the cinematic equivalent of a greeting card: Both the sentiment and the laughs are plentiful, cheap and forgettable.

The result proves to be as appealing and effervescent as a flute of flat champagne.

Through it all, Marshall sticks to his rose-colored principles: You gotta have hope, listen to your heart and take leaps of faith. Plus a new one: Parker should never make it through a movie without at least one pair of fabulous shoes.

New Year's Eve is a dreary plod through the sands of time until finally the last grain has trickled through the hourglass of cinematic sludge. How is it possible to assemble more than two dozen stars in a movie and find nothing interesting for any of them to do?

Director Garry Marshall continues his systematic defilement of society's most romantic holidays with another rom-com built - and executed - like a '70s disaster movie.

The lesson to learn from watching Garry Marshall's New Year's Eve, a predictably insufferable, self-congratulatory cash cow designed to be ingested and then happily discharged without a second thought by gullible moviegoers who just don't know any better, is that we live in a time without economic dignity, a time in which we must be ready to do just about anything for a paycheck.

A movie so excruciating that it makes its predecessor, "Valentine's Day," seem like "Nashville" in comparison.