Review of P.S. I Love You (2007) by Matthew B — 25 Sep 2013

PS I love you draws the audience in, then loses them along the way. As the first scene opens, the viewer sees a young man chasing a young woman through flights of stairs, as if they were in an argument, clearly over something the man did wrong. Then the director, Richard LaGravenese, leads you into a scene that happens in most typical relationships: family talk. The couple then kisses and makes up five minutes later. What an attention grabbing introduction. He leads you right into a brawl between Gerry (Gerard Butler) and Holly (Hilary Swank) when you're supposed to assume they're madly in love, hence the title.

After her husband's death, Holly encounters numerous letters written by him, leading her to different locations which are meant to help her overcome this tragedy. Along the way she goes to the bar where she first met him, and instantly it flashes back to him singing on stage and meeting her eyes. However it isn't clearly stated that it was a flashback, so it became quite difficult to distinguish the differences between present and past. The film then proceeds to jump back and forth from present to past without as much as a hint or warning. One minute you assume Gerry is deceased and the next he's up on the stage singing an old Irish tune. There's no clear transition through scene and plot.

While the plot was a little difficult to follow and the list of cast members could have been thought out more thoroughly. Gerry's friend from Ireland, William (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) was as close to a lookalike of Butler as you could get. In one of the letters he wrong for Holly, he instructed her to return to Ireland. As she was visiting, she ran into a guy and they have a subtle relationship. If you're at least going to set a widow up with someone new, make sure he doesn't have any resemblance to her ex. It's difficult to distinguish the two apart when they have the same accent, smile, personality and hair color. I'm thinking the director purposely made the two lovers of Swank to be quite similar, however it didn't seem to work out so well in his favor. There might as well have been only one of them with a costume change.

Holly drags her best friends all around to the different locations where these letters lead her to, and you could tell each of them were getting annoyed. They were moving on in their lives and she was still holding on to her memories and old life she shared with Gerry. Holly shuts herself out from everyone else and gets consumed in her own life issues.

P.S I Love You doesn't keep you on the edge of your seat or grasping on to the last word being said. The plot is mediocre and loses the audience constantly throughout the movie. The whole concept of the husband not telling his wife he's been suffering from an illness, and only leaves her with thoughtful letters that lead her to all the places they met, is a slap in the face to Holly. If someone did that in reality, hearts would be more than broken. They would be torn apart.