Andrew Schwartz | Warner Brothers

Josh Duhamel stars as Sam in New Line Cinema’s romantic comedy “New Year’s Eve,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release, in theaters nationwide on Dec. 9.

If you want to see the formula for a successful ensemble romantic comedy, look at “Love, Actually.” The British Christmas flick has already become a classic, and for good reason. The stories are all engaging and understated, and they connect to one another without stretching the boundaries of coincidence.

If, on the other hand, you want to see Hollywood throw together a bunch of celebrities and sappy platitudes and hope for the best, go see “New Year’s Eve.”

You would think that the abundance of famous actors in “New Year’s Eve” would be a selling point, and in a sense it is. Even the minor characters were mostly played by people I’ve heard of. Cary Elwes had a couple of lines as a doctor, and Sofía Vergara shows up as exactly the same character she plays on “Modern Family.” The most entertaining part of the movie was probably playing celebrity bingo.

But celebrity bingo is a double-edged sword—lack of character development aside, it was hard to care about the characters when I was so constantly aware of the actors playing them.

After seeing the movie, I was told my expectations were too high. The thing is, I saw “Valentine’s Day.” I knew what I was in for. I would have been perfectly happy with two hours of mindless entertainment—mini romantic arcs leading up to a bunch of kissing at midnight. I’m a girl—I’m practically hardwired to enjoy romantic on-screen kisses.

But while I have a high tolerance for romantic drivel, I simply couldn’t handle the sheer quantities of schmaltz that “New Year’s Eve” dishes out. I counted at least three monologues about what the new year means plus several musical performances accompanying montages of pseudo-meaningful moments.

Let’s list off some of the storylines, shall we? Someone is born. Someone dies. Someone has a husband at war. A mother bonds with her teenage daughter. A middle-aged woman realizes that this is the first day of the rest of her life. Couples either reconnect or meet for the first time. It all sounds good on paper, doesn’t it? And in real life, these are all huge, life-defining events. In fact, nearly every huge, life-defining event I can think of shows up at some point in the movie, as if director Garry Marshall was working from some sort of checklist. But instead of feeling that emotional weight, we hear about it, ad nauseam, in tidy clichéd monologues.

I don’t think I was the one with unrealistically high expectations for “New Year’s Eve.” I think that distinction belongs to Garry Marshall. Instead of letting the story be a celebration of pretty people making out in Times Square, he tried to artificially impose deeper meaning. Deeper meaning did not stick, and all the attempts at deeper meaning kind of ruined my enjoyment of what could have been a forgettable but entertaining movie.