I didn't hate Love Actually, but I didn't love it either...

Rating: 4/10 (7 May 2005)

Obviously, Richard Curtis set out to make the ultimate love story film of all time. Love Actually contains no less than nine (I think) different stories intertwined a la Short Cuts. They try to cover virtually every aspect of love there is (however, not a gay one - I guess that wasn't PC enough for a Christmas time feel-good movie).
Equally obvious is that there are way too many stories. The pacing is erratic, some subplots getting a lot of screen time, while others seem to have been forgotten about. Just witness how Laura Linney just disappears towards the end of the film. The end result would have been much better if they had just cut away half of the plots and fleshed out the remaining ones. In my opinion they should have kept the ones with Rickman - Thompson, Firth - Portugese maid, Linney, and (possibly) Keira Knightley.
Too many of the others are simply completely pointless. For example, Marshall's trip to the US to sleep with American women doesn't go anywhere. The only thing it's there for is to show of some "hot" young actresses like Elisha Cuthbert, Shannon Elizabeth, and Denise Richards. Throughout the film, there's also an obsession with showing women in (or preferably out of) their underwear. There's no reason for it, and it just feels really tacky.
The filmmakers don't want to risk that the audience actually has to think for themselves - so at every key moment in the film there's usually a song or a piece of music that lets you know exactly how you're supposed to feel. I know that everybody does it, but here it's just too obvious and clumsy. This can also be said about the choice of setting the film around Christmas time, as if most of these stories weren't sappy enough...
In conclusion, Love Actually is a decent film that could have been much better. Cramming in material enough for three films doesn't make it three times as good as one. There are some really great moments, but they're all to often lost among not so great ones. With a cast as great as this one, it must be tempting to use them as much as possible, but as it is now, most of them are sadly wasted. This is definitely a film where less would have been more. [4/10]