Cliché and Tired Retread

Rating: Null/10 (3 December 2004)

The themes of love and romance have produced some of the best films ever made. It's also produced some of the worst films ever made and Love Actually is one of those films.
There's several story lines in this film, one of them is about an aging and talentless rock star who takes one of his old hits and injects a lot of cliché lines about love and Christmas into the lyrics and spins it back out for consumption.
That is exactly what this film is.
There are characters, story lines, even verbatim lines and scenes that are stolen from other films. The soundtrack is unashamedly out of place, contrived to sell a compilation CD of its own soundtrack as quickly and conveniently as possible.
The outcomes of each story are cliché and resolve with thunderous and clumsy predictability.
The best actors in this film sleep walk through their roles, Neeson, Emma and Rickman look positively bored, and Hugh Grant literally seems to have shrunk 5 inches, to become a rather tired looking caricature of himself.
I walked away from this film actually feeling cynical about love, a feeling so horrible I needed a hot shower afterward.