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Present-day London, November. A prologue in Heathrow Airport introduces a number of parallel plotlines. Newly elected bachelor Prime Minister David is attracted to tea lady Natalie; he has her reassigned before driving to her home to declare his love. Fading pop star Billy Mack promotes a tacky single with cynical frankness, to his manager Joe's despair; it becomes the Christmas number one and they spend the holiday together. Recently widowed Daniel straggles to connect with his 11-year-old stepson Sam, who has a crush on an American classmate; with Daniel's encouragement Sam learns the drums to impress her before dashing to Heathrow to declare his love before she leaves.

Office manager Harry is seduced by his secretary. He buys her a necklace, which his wife Karen finds and thinks is for her; when she doesn't receive it she realises the situation but forgives Harry. Sarah, one of Harry's staff, has a long-standing crush on a colleague but is unable to pursue his advances because of her commitment to her mentally unwell brother. Writer Jamie discovers his girlfriend is unfaithful; retreating to his French cottage he falls for his Portuguese cleaner Aurelia, returns to London, then dashes to her hometown in Portugal and successfully proposes marriage.

Mark does not get on with his best friend Peter's new wife Juliet; he turns out to be in love with her, which he declares before walking away. Catering assistant Colin intends to go to the US to find a girlfriend; he buys a ticket to Milwaukee and within hours of landing has been picked up by three sexy girls. Two movie-set stand-ins become friendly while posing nude together, they end up arranging a date.

Many of the stories converge on a school nativity play in south London, then at Heathrow.

“Fuck, wank, bugger, shitting arse - This is shit, isn't it?" gripes washed-up rock singer Billy Mack under Love Actually's opening credits. "Yup. Solid gold shit, maestro," his manager replies. They're laying down an egregious Christmas cover of "Love Is All Around', the song revamped for Richard Curtis' breakthrough Four Weddings and a Funeral. With so many references to Four Weddings in the first ten minutes - the swearing, the song, a wedding, a funeral - it's tempting to see Billy's cynical festive exploitation as a proxy for Curtis' own approach. Even if his intentions are as sincere as the gushing prologue and press notes maintain, the result is a shallow, saccharine distillation of the romantic sentimentalism of his previous screenplays.

But whereas The Tall Guy, Notting Hill and Bridget Jones's Diary were each constructed around one blossoming relationship, Curtis has chosen for his directorial debut to juggle eight or nine plots. Instead of variations in tone, however, these strands and their characters all display the self-deprecatory affability established in Curtis' previous work; the familiarity is compounded by Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson and Colin Firth effectively reprising earlier roles. This combination of dramatic dispersal and tonal uniformity makes for 130-odd minutes of superficial viewing. If Robert Altman's finest work - the obvious model for such multi-stranded parallel storytelling - convinces us we are eavesdropping on lived lives, here the pat dialogue and situations make engagement a real challenge.

Such vapidity is particularly damaging in a film that asks us to take seriously its presentation of love; the prologue even invokes the text and phone messages sent from victims stranded in the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Yet without two plausible human beings to rub together Love Actually can only present a succession of formulaic Mills & Boon gestures, unsubstantiated emblems of passion that the audience is expected to indulge. When Laura Linney's office worker Sarah takes to the dance floor with the object of her affections, for example, the music cuts, mid-track, to a slow song. The elision of the actual substance of romance that should underpin this moment illustrates the film's approach: cut to the smooch. It's not simply that the characters' romantic feelings are unconvincing; often they barely know one another. The protagonists here don't so much declare love as confess crushes. Accordingly, the conclusion - a long parade of publicly staged embraces - has the unwelcome tinge of sentimental porn; the only chance of engaging with these empty gestures is to use them as springboards for one's own memories or fantasies.

Perhaps this sense of vicariousness accounts for Curtis' fascination with the faces of real people being reunited with loved ones at Heathrow. This is where many of the storylines converge, and the airport setting is apt given the film's confused transatlanticism. A certain amount has been made of the film's supposed anti-Americanism but, while it is true that Hugh Grant's PM trashes the special relationship because he doesn't like the way the President treats his tea lady, British-American relations have rarely seemed warmer. Sarah is wholly sympathetic, as is the glamorous ten-year-old American girl liked by the young stepson of one of the main characters. Curtis' scenic Thames shots, meanwhile, seem to be his picture-postcard love letters to the US audiences his films have always aspired to impress. That, in fact, is by far the most convincing courtship Love Actually has to offer.

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