P.S. I Love You (15.)
Directed by Richard LaGravenese.
Starring Hilary Swank, Gerald Butler, Lisa Kudrow, Harry Connick jr, Gina Gershon, Kathy Bates. 123 mins
Friends (the TV programme) + Death is an equation that ought to have potential. Various elements – Lisa Kudrow, the New York setting, even the credit font - seem designed to ape the TV programme, but put in the service of a resistible plot about a husband who continues to communicate with his wife after he’s died through carefully planned series of messages.
Hilary Swank reteams with LaGravenese, the writer director of Freedom Writers, in this romantic tragi-comedy. She’s a young widow who has to cope with the loss of her equally young Irish husband from a brain tumour. The audience I saw it with seemed to enjoy it for the first hour but then the laughs subsided and a trip to the Emerald Isle sucked the last bits of life out of it
The main problem is Gerald Butler, Oirish man. Butler’s attempt at Irish feel just like his portrayal of the King Leonidas in 300 – as if it’s been pieced together through research and fragments of information gleaned from obscure documents, but with no actual first hand experience. As a Scot you wouldn’t have thought the accent would be that much of a stretch but he goes about it with such ostentatious effort that you’d think he was Meryl Streep telling us she had a farm in Rfreeka.
In the sickly opening scene Swank has a domestic dispute with her husband, who overacts in the style of a disposable support player. It’s a relief that he won’t be in the film for much longer but then the credits roll and you see that that was actually himself, Gerald Butler, former Bond candidate and supposed star to be. And being Gerald Butler he’s not going to go quietly; but haunt the film in voiceover and flashback.
There is something oily and creepy about his character’s persistence from beyond the grave. It comes across less as an expression of eternal love, more like a house guest who just won’t take a hint that it’s time to leave. It doesn’t help that Butler plays him with a perpetual twinkle in his eye and a heaving chest that makes him look like a member of the cast of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers who’s a little out of breath after just finishing a big number but is still ready to belt out another one.
P.S. I Love You (15.)
Directed by Richard LaGravenese.
Starring Hilary Swank, Gerald Butler, Lisa Kudrow, Harry Connick jr, Gina Gershon, Kathy Bates. 123 mins
Friends (the TV programme) + Death is an equation that ought to have potential. Various elements – Lisa Kudrow, the New York setting, even the credit font - seem designed to ape the TV programme, but put in the service of a resistible plot about a husband who continues to communicate with his wife after he’s died through carefully planned series of messages.
Hilary Swank reteams with LaGravenese, the writer director of Freedom Writers, in this romantic tragi-comedy. She’s a young widow who has to cope with the loss of her equally young Irish husband from a brain tumour. The audience I saw it with seemed to enjoy it for the first hour but then the laughs subsided and a trip to the Emerald Isle sucked the last bits of life out of it
The main problem is Gerald Butler, Oirish man. Butler’s attempt at Irish feel just like his portrayal of the King Leonidas in 300 – as if it’s been pieced together through research and fragments of information gleaned from obscure documents, but with no actual first hand experience. As a Scot you wouldn’t have thought the accent would be that much of a stretch but he goes about it with such ostentatious effort that you’d think he was Meryl Streep telling us she had a farm in Rfreeka.
In the sickly opening scene Swank has a domestic dispute with her husband, who overacts in the style of a disposable support player. It’s a relief that he won’t be in the film for much longer but then the credits roll and you see that that was actually himself, Gerald Butler, former Bond candidate and supposed star to be. And being Gerald Butler he’s not going to go quietly; but haunt the film in voiceover and flashback.
There is something oily and creepy about his character’s persistence from beyond the grave. It comes across less as an expression of eternal love, more like a house guest who just won’t take a hint that it’s time to leave. It doesn’t help that Butler plays him with a perpetual twinkle in his eye and a heaving chest that makes him look like a member of the cast of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers who’s a little out of breath after just finishing a big number but is still ready to belt out another one.
