One wedding, one funeral and one big mess

If we're to believe Richard Curtis, the director and screenwriter for Love Actually, love is the simplest of human emotions, easily spray-painted pink, perfumed and gift-wrapped for your emotional pleasure. While Curtis' romantic comedies have always led the way in cloying fuzziness, Love Actually is without a doubt the most ridiculously two-dimensional, sermonizing view on love ever to escape his soft-hearted clutches.

And such a clichéd attempt to box in love is inexplicable when Curtis gives himself no less than nine different plotlines and infinitely more perspectives to work with. But instead of presenting us with a multitude of unique relationships that expand our definition of love and interest us in his characters, Curtis instead chose to explore only the most banal aspects of romantic love in what boils down to one story written nine times for different age groups.

It also becomes increasingly obvious while watching Love Actually that not only has Curtis failed to deviate significantly from all other work in this genre, he was unable to avoid pirating his own films, mostly Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, and Bridget Jones's Diary. With a largely repeat cast, recycled characters and a liberal number of pages stolen from Curtis' previous scripts, there's nothing in Love Actually, no emotional charge, human insight or comedy fix, that you couldn't have gotten from any one or combination of his other romantic comedies.

And why Curtis lifted only the bad parts out of his other movies (including the unavoidable Hugh Grant) is a mystery. Gone are the trademark wacky friends and human heroes, instead replaced with specious, unclear connections and stereotyped characters.

Love Actually tracks entangled and emphatically British romances during the five weeks before Christmas. Beginning with the stalled love life of Britain's new Prime Minister (Hugh Grant, which is a thought to scare small children) and working it's way down, the story covers the strained marriage of Harry and Karen (Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson), the new marriage of Peter and Juliet (Chiwetel Ejiofor and Keira Knightley), the finished marriage of Jamie (Colin Firth) and most other stages of not-marriage in between.

One of the primary problems with Love Actually is its convoluted character web. What results from the pluralist plotlines is a lot of little snippets, beginnings and ends of stories, but nothing in between. All action seems sudden, and all romantic development so rushed that you neither identify with nor care about or even understand the relationships. Often characters are abandoned for so long that you simply forget that they existed and resent being jerked back to their uninteresting stories just as the tale of one of their costars was beginning to heat up.

It almost seems like interesting possibilities in these relationships are intentionally ignored. For example, Juliet and Peter, the newlyweds, are an interracial couple. Yet their brief screen time is invested in the trite exploration of Peter's best friend's unrequited love for Juliet.

The most engaging person in Love Actually is Colin (Kris Marshall), a young lad with a nothing job confidant that lots of sex with hot babes is just an ocean away. "I am Colin, God of sex," he declares to his friend. "I'm just on the wrong continent." Convinced that American girls will be attracted to his "cute, British accent" and will therefore overlook the fact that he has the maturity of an underdeveloped three-year-old, Colin mortgages his apartment and journeys to the United States in search of a date. While the rest of the characters get lost in an hour-long downer somewhere in the middle of the film, Colin is busy seducing girls in a Wisconsin bar.

In Colin, Curtis finds his comic voice. His sweetness shines most clearly through the father-son duo Daniel (Liam Neeson) and Sam (Thomas Sangster). Immediately following the death of his wife, Daniel learns that that his young stepson is in love. Instead of rejecting his feelings, Daniel takes Sam's declaration at face value, and the two set out to attract the girl of Sam's dreams, distracting Daniel from his grief. The simplicity of their affection for each other transcends the gooeyness of the idea.

The rest of the film, however, remains bogged down in sticky fantasy, unable to rise about the clutches of the clichés it so desperately believes in. Too many characters with too few differences make for a film too bad to love.

Love Actually is R for sexuality, nudity and language.