COMEDY/ROMANCE

As the well-connected daughter of the current Taoiseach, author Cecilia Ahern could surely have pulled a few strings to ensure her novel PS I Love You avoided the abhorrent adaptation offered here by screenwriter/director Richard La Gravanese. Gerard Butler and Hilary Swank feature as Gerry and Holly Kennedy, a New York couple whose marriage is cut cruelly short when he dies of a brain tumour. Emotionally distant from her concerned mother (Kathy Bates), Holly’s grief at losing her partner is tempered when she finds a series of helpful messages written by her husband before he died.

Their relationship unravels through a series of flashback scenes which give Swank the impossible task of playing herself at 19 and showcasing an Irish brogue from Butler that’s seemingly on loan from Father’s Ted’s Mrs Doyle. Swank’s Holly is initially reluctant to re-engage with lurve, but she recovers her sense of womanhood through buying lamps, going on holiday to Ireland, designing some shoes and having sex with a gormless pub singer.

Holly’s sub-Sex and the City gal-pals, Gina Gershon and Lisa Kudrow glower witheringly from the sidelines, no doubt while Harry Connick Jr provides a serving of overcooked beefcake as a bar-worker with unrequited feelings for Swank. Over-long, blandly made and utterly ham-fisted in its consideration of human relationships, PS I Love You is pure BS from start to finish.

General release from Fri 4 Jan.