New York, I Love You!

High profile actors like Shia LaBeouf, Natalie Portman, Orlando Bloom, Julie Christie, Ethan Hawke, Bradley Cooper, Hayden Christensen, Robin Wright Penn, Andy Garcia, Blake Lively and Christina Ricci drift in and out of a series of deeply superficial love-story vignettes in New York, I Love You! Not to be confused with the better 2006 film, Paris, je t’aime, much of New York, I Love You! is so banal and lackluster that residents of the great city ought to sue for damages.

The omnibus movie is credited to 11 directors (including Shekhar Kapur, Brett Ratner, Mira Nair, Yvan Attal, Natalie Portman and Shunji Iwai) and a truckload of writers ranging from Anthony Minghella and Israel Horowitz to Scarlett Johansson. The stories, most of which end in a “twist” easily spotted from miles off, vary from the potentially sublime (Julie Christie as a fading opera singer befriended by deformed hotel bellboy Shia LaBeouf) to the ridiculous (wheelchair-bound Olivia Thirlby gets Anton Yelchin to take her to the prom, tie her to a Central Park tree and have airborne sex with her). Then, there is a painfully obvious segment in which Robin Wright Penn leaves husband Chris Cooper at a restaurant table while she smokes outdoors, toys with smitten Ethan Hawke and muses with mock-profundity, “This is what I’ve always loved about New York—those little moments on the sidewalks. You can watch the buildings and feel the air and look at the people and sometimes meet somebody you feel like you could talk to.”

Not only does the flick choke on its on vapidity, but it also lacks juice, humor, sexiness and any sense of the ethnic and sexual diversity that make up New York in all its cranked-up, alluring, dangerous, exhausting, exhilarating essence. Just how many talents does it take to screw up a movie, anyway?