It’s a real measure of just how little profanity shocks us these days that a wan, insipid bit of romcom fluff like F Valentine’s Day gets an f bomb, or at least an implied f bomb, in its title. Perhaps that’s the only way to bring any sort of attention to this forgettable Valentine’s Day release on Amazon Prime, because no actual aspect of the film’s artistic merits is going to do that. As for critics writing about it, well, we’ll just have to get over our annoyance that you can’t even write out the full title of Mark Gantt‘s film in a family publication.

Gina (Virginia Gardner) hates Valentine’s Day for a pretty compelling reason: It was the day she was born. While people born on other big holidays can usually get friends to celebrate with them, Gina can’t, because every activity on that day is geared toward romantic love. And even when she does have a partner on her birthday, he isn’t likely to give her a separate gift, it’ll just be a combined birthday-Valentine’s Day present, and will likely have a big red heart festooned to it.

So in the spirit of the title, she’s gone fully at war with the holiday, perpetrating scams like selling dinner reservations to couples who didn’t book in time. That it would hardly be worth her time to go to a fancy restaurant and suspiciously claim multiple reservations – just so she can have those vibrating pagers that tell you when your table is ready, to sell to couples at $50 a pop – is just the sort of questionable logistics with which this movie doesn’t concern itself.

Of course, Gina’s corresponding cynicism about finding love is going to be challenged by two men, one of whom is quite obviously the “right one” and one of whom is quite obviously the “wrong one” – which just means we’re going to have to spend too much time with the wrong one first. He’s Andrew (Pitch Perfect veteran Skylar Astin), and he’s different from her in as many ways as they both can imagine. When she asks if he’s a Raiders fan – as in the Los Angeles football team – he says that he loves all the Indiana Jones movies. But she comes up with a rationale that maybe someone different from her will finally be key to unlocking her dormant potential for happiness.

But before then she got to dump an anti-Valentine’s diatribe on Johnny (Jake Cannavale, Bobby’s son), the owner of a neighbourhood pizza restaurant, whose benevolent qualities are represented by the fact that he does the deliveries himself – though has had the misfortune of delivering Gina a heart-shaped pizza on her birthday. She’ll meet Johnny again later, under less contentious circumstances – a year later, in fact, when she’s on a Greek getaway with the eager-to-propose Andrew. See, that night, when he comped her the heart-shaped pizza, she inadvertently gifted him a voucher to this Greek resort that she thought was for $50 but was actually for $5,000 due to a smudge that looked like a decimal point. (Remember what we already said about this movie’s questionable logic.)

Parodixically given its name, F Valentine’s Day is quite sweet – which is not sufficient here to be a virtue. Surely, most Amazon surfers will find it goes down pleasantly enough with few enough challenges on their Valentine’s Day weekend, but what about those who thought the title promised something raw and daring? The pretense that the movie has any balls is thrown out the window pretty early on, when we learn that Gina doesn’t have the reasons to hate the holiday you might suspect – though she’s sitting on a pretty significant one that won’t come up until later. Point is, if you’ve got a title like this, we’re expecting something a little wicked, not something that is basically indistinguishable from every other romcom out there.

Actually, F Valentine’s Day does have two distinguishing elements, and their names are Marisa Tomei and Lil Rel Howery. As Gina’s mother and Gina’s best friend’s husband, respectively, the two stars were clearly brought in to “famous up” a movie that boils down to trying to give a number of actors we don’t know very well their big, or bigger, break. (Natasha Leggero, as that best friend, isn’t quite famous enough to participate fully in the “famousing up,” but she’s also enjoyable – even though she’s a full 20 years older than the actress playing her best friend.) Tomei and Howery aren’t just here for a paycheque, and light up the screen every time they are on it.

As for the others? Well Gardner was actually in the similarly titled F Mary Kill last year, as well as Fall a few years before that, and Cannavale has the pedigree of being Bobby’s son, and Astin has the legacy of being that singing prick in Pitch Perfect. None of them does a bad job, but neither do they elevate this material that sorely needs it.

The truth is, F Valentine’s Day is the sort of movie that’s so conventional in its formula that it leaves a critic writing two to three paragraphs about the cast and what other movies they were in. Which might mean it’s the perfect thing for the right sort of viewer to watch on Valentine’s Day. No offence to that right sort of viewer, but maybe the rest of us would like just a little bit more.

 

F Valentine’s Day is currently playing on Amazon Prime.