The lone man spinning a "Homes for Sale" sign on a street median about midway through Garry Marshall's Valentine's Day means nothing. It might seem like a minor thing to point out; but with the exception of several dozen product placements, it is the only thing throughout the film's excruciating 120 minutes that could possibly be misconstrued as a sign of our stormy present. Marshall's latest celluloid stiff is nothing but a romantic fantasy; an alternate Los Angeles where coincidence is commonplace and (finally!) every white woman in America finds her Prince Charming in the span of one day. And what's so wrong with that? Conceptually, nothing. And certainly no fault can be found (initially) with a cast that boasts enough A-listers to make US Weekly seize with pleasure. But if nothing else, Valentine's Day stands as a sort of cautionary tale of what happens when assembled talent is matched by an indifferent production team. The plot? Well, that's a bit of a grey area. To put it quaintly, it's Valentine's Day in Los Angeles and everyone's guts have gone all ooey-gooey. Anne Hathaway's neurotic phone-sex operator and daytime temp fawns over her mailroom Romeo Topher Grace while Jessica Biel's overworked, Cupid-bashing PR warrior starts seeing something in Jamie Foxx's second-rate sports journalist. At a high school, an adorably vapid twosome (country-pop princess Taylor Swift and lycanthropic heartbreaker Taylor Lautner) dole out sex advice to a couple planning to drop their respective V-cards (Emma Roberts and Carter Jenkins). Never mind where Julia Roberts' soldier-on-leave, Patrick Dempsey's incorrigible two-timer, a gay Brett Favre (Eric Dane), and an elderly couple tending to an uncovered infidelity (Hector Elizondo and Shirley MacLaine) fit in the mess. Neither miniseries nor multi-generational Altman-esque portrait of the city of the angels, Valentine's Day doesn't shoot the moon with its bloated casting as much as it goes about the bold task of showing the many ways white heterosexuals find love -- its singular romantic moment between two men is played as comedic reveal. If there is an anchor to this milieu, it would be Ashton Kutcher as a flower-shop owner and manager who must simultaneously deal with a hesitant fiancée (Jessica Alba) and his loving, lovely best friend (Jennifer Garner). Director Marshall, working from Katherine Fugate's script, can't even afford a delicate or subtle moment for this triptych, his most prevalent storyline. Further elongating the string of shallow duds he's worked on diligently since the mid-90s, Marshall's seventeenth feature will be best remembered for the sheer amount of cliché jokes, worn-thin set-ups and abhorrently over-sentimental climaxes it amasses in two hours. A live, snapping wire among dead cables, only Hathaway finds any sincerity and humor in her situation, vamping through her cellular encounters; she seems to be the only one having fun. In its entirety, Valentine's Day takes the saccharine concepts of its dozen-or-so vignettes far too seriously to bother having fun or allow the audience to enjoy themselves. To be fair, as a gesture on par with a Hallmark card, the film works indefinitely. As romance, fantasy or otherwise, there's nothing here that a strategically played R. Kelly song wouldn't do ten times better.