The year is 2010. Barack Obama is still the president, iPads are the newest offering from Apple, and movies like "Toy Story 3" and "Inception" are making waves at the box office. Also, after the success of ensemble romantic comedies like "He's Just Not That Into You," which came out in 2009, we started getting movies like "Valentine's Day" — which happens to feature Taylor Swift in her first-ever acting role on the big screen
.Swift, who has been declared "NO LONGER HOT" by a different president,
is best known as a Grammy Award-winning and record-smashing singer-songwriter whose career has spanned nearly two decades already (pretty impressive when you consider that Swift is only in her mid-30s). I'll circle back to her accolades and accomplishments shortly — and, despite claims about her hotness as a cultural force, there are many! — but let's talk about her role in "Valentine's Day," a sprawling film and critical flop that features Swift alongside rom-com staples and A-list stars like Julia Roberts, Jennifer Garner, Patrick Dempsey, Jessica Biel, Bradley Cooper, Anne Hathaway, and many more.
"Valentine's Day," like "He's Just Not That Into You" and "Love Actually" before it, tells a bunch of seemingly unconnected stories before weaving them all together, and that includes the story of high school lovers Felicia Miller (Swift) and Willy Harrington (Taylor Lautner, now a friend of Swift's and one of her high-profile boyfriends back in the day), who are commemorating the holiday with over-the-top shows of affection. Swift is, honestly, pretty funny as Felicia, who's on the dance team — showing off her "moves" in a particularly fun scene, which is particularly amusing when you consider that Swift is infamously not known as a great dancer — and compared to luminaries like Roberts, Garner, and Biel, she barely appears in the movie at all. (Swift was a decently big deal in 2010, but wasn't anywhere near her current level of notoriety, so her small supporting role makes sense.) So what did critics think about "Valentine's Day" when it came out in 2010? Not much, honestly!
Read more: The Greatest Character Actors Of All Time, Ranked
Critics Definitely Didn't Fall In Love With Valentine's Day
To say that critics didn't care for "Valentine's Day" is an understatement; the film earned a dismal 18% on Rotten Tomatoes with a critical consensus that declares, "Eager to please and stuffed with stars, 'Valentine's Day' squanders its promise with a frantic, episodic plot and an abundance of rom-com cliches." Unsurprisingly, individual critics weren't any kinder, like Peter Bradshaw, who railed against the film and called it "a brutal St Valentine's Day massacre of comedy, of love, of believable human emotion" in The Guardian.
"Every skit is lame, every line of dialogue is stale, every joke falls flat, and every performance has been phoned in between text messages to agents blinking, 'SOS!'" Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote in her review for Entertainment Weekly. Simon Abrams agreed in his review for Slant Magazine, calling the film "about as personal and memorable as a seasonal card your significant other snatches up from a local Duane Reade at the last minute." The late legend Roger Ebert weighed in and said, rather scathingly, "'Valentine's Day' is so desperate to keep all the characters alive, it's like those Russian jugglers who run around, trying to keep all their plates spinning on poles."
Over at Rolling Stone, Peter Travers echoed a lot of the other reviews, writing, "'Valentine's Day' is a date movie from hell. How did director Garry Marshall persuade a big name cast to stuff themselves into this box of rancid heart-shaped chocolates?" In her review for the Washington Post, Jen Chaney opined, "This feels less like a movie and more like a strategically programmed effort to turn as many demographic groups as possible into mooshy, gooshy, candy-heart-munching morons." Despite these disastrous reviews, it wasn't the end of Taylor Swift's big-screen attempts — though it was a dire warning of things to come.
Taylor Swift's Acting Resume Isn't Great ... But She Has Other Industries To Conquer
When Charles Dickens wrote about experiencing the best and worst of times, he accidentally predicted Taylor Swift's 2010. Yes, she appeared in "Valentine's Day" at the beginning of the year, but she also released her third studio album "Speak Now" that fall, which marked a major creative milestone for the young singer as it was her first album with one credited songwriter on every track: Swift herself. That album was followed by "Red," then the Grammy-winning "1989," and since 2010, fans like me have been treated to a whopping eight studio albums and four re-recorded albums, including "Fearless," "Speak Now," "Red," and "1989," which all feature additional vault tracks as part of Swift's quest to reclaim her life's work with her "Taylor's Version" project. (In May 2025, Swift used her considerable fortune to buy the master recordings of her first six albums back from a holding company that once worked with her nemesis Scooter Braun to essentially hold them hostage, which may or may not put an end to this project — but if I've learned anything from watching Swift's career, it's that you should never say never.) In February 2024, Swift became the only artist in Grammy history to win Album of the Yearfour times thanks to her 2022 album "Midnights," and she took the opportunity to announce her eleventh album, "The Tortured Poets Department," which released that spring and immediately smashed streaming records.
All of this is to say that Swift is very successful, but I wouldn't say her big-screen efforts have matched her success in the musical realm. Between flops like "Amsterdam," "The Giver," and the universally reviled 2019 flop "Cats," Swift's acting resumé isn't particularly great, but that's fine, because she's proven herself to be a talented director after helming several of her own music videos (and she does have a deal to write and direct a film with Searchlight Pictures, though nothing has come to pass with that as of this writing). Besides, Swift made her mark on the movie industry in the fall of 2023 with the concert film of her world-spanning, record-breaking Eras Tour, so she's doing just fine — despite her roles in films like "Valentine's Day."
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Read the original article on SlashFilm.
