Movie Review: P.S. I Love You (2007)

The 2007 remake of P.S. I Love You is a movie that embodies the strengths and weaknesses of the genre known as "chick flicks." These movies concern female characters and female behavior. Chick flicks can be seen as the embodiment of the male chauvinistic attitude that females are inferior to men. Certainly, the female characters in these flicks have a tendency to idiocy and sugary sweetness to the point of making you sick.

Not all chick flicks are drivel. There are a few that are actually good. One such is "A Walk to Remember" that featured a genuinely nice girl who was beset by bullies, lesbians and sluts who were out to get her because she was a virgin. This was an especially well conceived movie.

However good a movie that "A Walk to Remember" is, the same cannot be said about the 2007 remake of P.S. I Love You . When you finish this movie, you will be saying to yourself, "P.S. I wasted my time and hard earned money on this trash." It is that bad.

The problems with P.S. I Love You begin right at the start. A contentious couple, Holly Kennedy (Hilary Swank) and Gerry Kennedy (Gerard Butler) have a fight. The nature of this fight is identical to that of the fights of at least 90% of all of the chick flicks ever made. Gerry is a loving man who is completely devoted to his wife and marriage. Holly however, is an evil shrew who seems to be going all out to destroy her husband's life and sanity.

Almost once this fight is over, Gerry passes away. As it happens, Gerry was a saint as shown by the fact that he created a plan to send a number of letters to his widowed wife with the idea that they would help her with her grief concerning his death. This movie deals with her grief in a fleeting way which makes you wonder just how committed she was the the marriage in the first place. Ditto for the flashbacks that Holly has concerning positive memories of her marriage to Gerry.

As if this scenario was not unbelievable enough, the movie makers added more implausible elements, Holly's new boyfriend, Daniel (Harry Connick Jr.) is insensitive to the point of absurdity while Denise (Lisa Kudrow) & Sharon (Gina Gershon) go through the motions as Holly's girlfriends. This movie also needlessly adds numerous subplots, hardly any of which are resolved. On top of all this is the frequently shaky camera work that winds up making the audience dizzy. The script is nothing but a compendium of chick flick cliches.

Chick flicks such as P.S. I Love You are nothing but empty headed exercises in pure drivel. They are mindless and insulting to the intelligence of the audience. They are also classic examples of target audience-focused movies that wind up as a waste of both time and money. Only a few months from now, P.S. I Love You will be just another empty chick flick on the DVD store shelves. The only redeeming value of P.S. I Love You is that like most other chick flicks, it has a decent number of good looking babes, dolls, girls, gals, pussies or whatever else you like to refer to members of the fairer sex as being.