Romantic comedy. Starring Hilary Swank, Sarah Jessica Parker, Katherine Heigl, Jon Bon Jovi, Josh Duhamel, Robert De Niro, Halle Berry, Michelle Pfeiffer and Ashton Kutcher. Directed by Garry Marshall. (PG-13. 118 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

What can be said about a movie that is nice and awful? That has a warm spirit and is 100 percent phony? That has all the stars in the galaxy and all the appeal of rotting fish? Garry Marshall's "New Year's Eve" takes one of the calendar's most interesting holidays - the most extreme and irrational, the one that acknowledges death, the one that reacts to fear - and renders it innocuous and dull.

The casting is the least of this movie's problems, but the most bizarre. Michelle Pfeiffer plays a lonely old biddy - what are they trying to do to her? - and Sarah Jessica Parker (born 1965) and Zac Efron (born 1987) are brother and sister. (Oh, their poor mother.) Josh Duhamel, who looks as if he's 30, goes through the movie talking about a planned midnight rendezvous with the woman of his dreams. Then the woman shows up, looking not quite old enough to be his mother, but like a half sister from a previous marriage. It's as if the roles were handed out by lottery.

Marshall is known as one of the nicest guys in the business. (I met him once and believe that to be true.) But a problem of "New Year's Eve" is that all the characters are as nice as he is - even nicer, because in person Marshall has a sharp wit, whereas the characters here are like innocent children. To the extent that they have any willfulness at all, it's a child's willfulness. Thus Katherine Heigl, as a woman angry at having been jilted by her rock star lover (Jon Bon Jovi), reacts by throwing eggs at his poster.

The plot is built flimsily around several interlinked stories. Hilary Swank is the woman in charge of the Times Square festivities, but oh no, there is an electrical short in the Times Square ball. So she goes before the assembled New York press to explain the situation and launches into a speech about forgiveness and new beginnings, as the sound track swells. Those New York reporters must be a bunch of pushovers, because they fall for this and don't ask a single question.

Parker plays the mother of a 15-year-old girl (Abigail Breslin, who has become all-too convincing at playing absolute brats). The girl sneaks out of the house to go to Times Square, while poor lonely Pfeiffer gets a guided tour around New York from spunky Efron. Meanwhile, in a nod to the cycles of life and death, two couples (Til Schweiger and Sarah Paulson, and Seth Meyers and Jessica Biel) compete to have the first baby of 2012, while nurse Halle Berry sits vigil over the bed of a sick man (Robert De Niro) who might not make it through the night. Come to think of it, he's pretty loquacious for a guy with 10 toes, 10 fingers and nine fingernails in the grave.

The jokes are corny and not funny. There really may not be a single laugh in the picture. The moments of tender feeling have no feeling at all. Even Ashton Kutcher looks uncomfortable, as though the whole thing were beneath his dignity - even his dignity. Lea Michele sings "Auld Lang Syne" - that's good. That's about 90 good seconds. It's clear what the attempt here was, to capture the mystery of time and the romance of New York on a magical night when the streets are alive, etc. But that's not what we get.

Too bad. Wouldn't you love to see a 1911 movie about the turn of the year 1912 to get an idea of how people saw themselves and their world? Alas, one hundred years from now, anyone watching "New Year's Eve" to see what we were like won't have a clue.