Your favorite actor or actress is in New Year's Eve. I promise.

He or she might be an extra, walking past the camera waving a million-dollar check. Or he or she might have a cameo where playing a shallow version of a character you loved from another movie, but they're there. They have to be. Everyone is in this movie.

That's pretty much the premise. For anyone who saw last year's Valentine's Day, also directed by Garry Marshall, you know what to expect. Marshall takes over two dozen stars, pairs them up, gives them storylines that seem ripped off from bad Lifetime holiday movies, finds ways for those storylines to somehow intersect and then pushes out some overbearing, warm and fuzzy message.

This time the random vignettes revolve around the ball dropping on New Year's Eve in New York City. Hilary Swank plays Claire Morgan, who is in charge of the actual ball dropping along with her friend Brandon, a New York City police officer played by Chris "Ludacris" Bridges who seems to provide nothing but moral support (who brings his best performance since 2003's 2 Fast 2 Furious). Of course the drop doesn't go as planned, and it becomes a race against time to fix it. I won't ruin the ending for you, but if you can't already predict what happens, this is the perfect movie for you.

Then we have Michelle Pfeiffer as Ingrid, accompanied by Zac Efron as Paul. In this story, Ingrid decides to cross everything off of her New Year's resolution list in one day, and Paul helps her so she will give him tickets to the biggest after-party in the city. This is easily the most awkward of the stories, as Ingrid literally seems like someone who escaped from a mental ward and is trying to "live it up" just one more time before she is forced back. Meanwhile, Efron forgot he wasn't acting in a Disney TV movie as the cool youngster who helps her achieve her goals and then seems somewhat romantically involved with her. There may be a better film trapped somewhere in this mess ... but probably not.

Sarah Jessica Parker plays Kim, a fashion designer and mother to Hailey (Abigail Breslin of Little Miss Sunshine). Hailey just wants to spend New Year's Eve with her boyfriend and get the midnight kiss that she longs for. Unfortunately for Hailey, her mother is boring, overprotective and prone to overacting, which leads to a New Year's chase around the city as Kim tries to figure out where her daughter ran off to. The two have no chemistry, and the thinking behind casting them together was probably "they're both blondish."

To round things out, we have Jon Bon Jovi and Katherine Heigl (accompanied by sidekick Sofia Vergara of Modern Family) with a rock-star-versus-talented-chef love story that's both improbable and unappetizing. Then Jessica Biel and Seth Myers show up, playing an expecting couple trying to have their child be the first baby born in 2012 for a $25,000 cash prize. To their credit, this is the only enjoyable storyline in the entire movie, but it gets hidden in the heap of other terrible plots. Josh Duhamel plays a CEO bachelor finally looking to settle down with the woman whom he met—get this—last New Year's Eve. There's Ashton Kutcher as a depressed yuppie who fatefully gets stuck in an elevator with Lea Michele (of Glee).

Finally, we have Robert DeNiro playing a bed-ridden father dying of cancer and regretting everything he's ever done, who only wants to see the ball drop one last time before he dies. Truthfully, you're kind of rooting for DeNiro to die to save him from this role. Oh yeah, Halle Berry is his nurse, and her husband is rapper-actor Common, who appears in the film for 30 seconds (literally) in a video chat on Christmas because he's a soldier stuck in Iraq. This movie tries so hard to appeal to everyone that it ends up appealing to no one.

This is the type of movie where the production team thought it would be a good idea to give Bon Jovi (essentially playing himself) and Vergara's increasingly offensive stereotypical role more screen time than the two best performers, DeNiro and Berry.

The entire idea is actually brilliant. Every person in this movie probably signed on knowing they'd only have to film for about a day and then could take home a big paycheck. With so many popular actors and actresses, this movie is bound to make millions because the cast seems like it's too good to fail.

My biggest issue with New Year's Eve is the overarching feeling that the audience has been tricked out of its money by the time the movie ends. The characters in this movie aren't counting down to midnight nearly as much as the viewers are. The stories are predictable, and the lines can be broken down into a combination of bad soap opera dialogue and Hallmark cards. It's not that Marshall's aspirations are too lofty. In fact, it's the opposite. His aspirations are only to get all of these names in the same movie and watch his bank account grow. Movies like this can work. Take 2003's Love Actually, which was successful because each story was given the individual attention it deserved. Here, every story could be a bad movie all on its own.

New Year's Eve's main claim is that a new year gives way to fresh starts and new opportunities. If that's true, then here's one for the studios: Never make a movie like this again.