Why does this movie have a better rating than other chick flicks?

Rating: 2/10 (24 October 2013)

This movie probably only has a better rating than other movies of the same genre because it *desperately* stuffed, jammed and shoe-horned every celebrity in Britain.
There were moments in this movie that I liked. I guess it was cute to have the Portuguese woman and Colin Firth dude to have that language barrier and fall in love. I really liked the Prime Minister's part of the story, probably the most. The naked couple with John Watson/Bilbo Baggins was cute too. Yes, there were many cute parts. The ending for the Laura Linney character was fine. It's realistic enough and I'm glad the movie gave a face to her situation so that we could understand it.
Movies/shows are allowed to be cheesy, dumb, naive, fantastical and campy in my opinion. They can be all of these things and still be great. But there's such a thing as a movie that is all of these things, and happens to be *POORLY CRAFTED.*
This is a pretty unconventional format -- stuffing tons of different stories into one movie, with some dozen high-profile actors and actresses. This movie did mainly 2 things to make this movie out of reach of being a good one:
1. preaching its theme of "love" and taking itself too seriously 2. too many characters, 1 movie's-length of time to care about them
Into the second half of the movie, I really didn't want to care anymore. Sure it was sweet that Colin Firth went all the way to Portuguese lady's place to propose (other than the fact that the Portuguese lady was the only option around), that's okay, but having a huge room full of people right there and applauding? What the hell else is supposed to happen? Was she going to say "no" and humiliate him in front of everybody? This movie didn't have to go that far to make the plot for Colin Firth's character a "point-of-no-return-or-he-will-be-humiliated" kind of plot.
I didn't care about the dude who went to America when he first sprang the idea that the problem was his geographical location. I didn't care about the dude at all after that.
The pairing I hated the most was the kid actor and the American girl. And Qui-Gon Jinn. I couldn't care less. It wasn't cute to me. It was just super annoying. It's not even about the fact that if I were a parent, I'd tell him "You just grew your testicles, you don't know a damn thing yet," it's the fact that this is an R-rated movie and we're indulging this 11-year-old fictional character. Someone just decided to shove Mickey Mouse Club into the same movie with nude breast-grabbing and nude thrusting. Qui-Gon Jinn was like some sad guest on Elmo's world, trying to help Elmo chase his American love interest through the airport. The kid didn't even appear to have a care in the world about his mother who'd just died. Instead he was all down in a first-world problem 11-YEAR-OLD's "hell-hole" that is his shallow crush on some other girl, all just because this movie wanted to "lovify" *every* single character in the movie.
This movie has little re-watch value to me. If there was a great piece of cake in your fridge, but 70% of it was moldy, would you eat it? Somehow this piece of moldy cake has a 7.7 on IMDb, while there's plenty of other WHOLE and FRESH tasty cakes of the same genre to relish more and are less realistic, but people have rated them much lower.
Some movies with the same sort of theme (mainly chick flicks), and are pretty cheesy and naive, I'd include:
Father of the Bride, Hitch, Mean Girls, Monster-in-Law, 13 going on 30, Miss Congeniality
Somehow all of these movies are rated lower... but they're all fun to watch 100% through. They're all *well-crafted*. They're consistent in their tone and audience. They don't have moments like in Love Actually where I'd react, "Wow, you serve me this on a plate and you expect me to eat it?"
This movie tried too hard to preach, and I could tell the crafting process of this movie was frantic and desperate by the ridiculous amount of casting. Could every part of this movie have been consistent with the objective of this movie? "Love"?? Love in all forms? Shallow primal infatuation like the kid actor and the guy who comes back with some hot American girls?
Even my favorite story of this movie, the Prime Minister's, was tainted. The American president was shoe-horned in there just to cheesily drive the plot forward. The president's come-on to Natalie and then the Prime Minister's come-back in return was incredibly contrived, and I felt it was very unnecessary, along with the collateral damage of some negative sentiments towards Americans (which of course isn't to be taken seriously). Was there no better way to create a rift between two characters in a plot device to "tighten their bond"?
A lot of this movie is great. Unfortunately it is thoroughly tainted by the most disruptive, disgusting parts of the movie.
Shows, stories, MOVIES are *allowed* to have tons of different main characters. I'm sure it's possible for those kinds of movies to be great. But for me, the biggest flops in this movie flopped the entire movie miserably.