There’s nothing like a good tear-jerker — and “Me Before You” is nothing like a good tear-jerker.
What could have been a pleasurable two-hanky romance between a plucky working-class girl and a rich quadriplegic gets buried in whimsy and suffocated with a terminal case of the cutesies. Forget art, or even craft: This is the kind of movie that can’t even get its shameless audience-pandering in order.
It doesn’t help that screenwriter Jojo Moyes (adapting her best-selling novel) and director Thea Sharrock (making her big-screen debut) make the heroine of the piece fairly insufferable: Luisa has been written as a greatest-hits collection of two-dimensional female screen characters throughout the decades, from the can-do shopgirls of the 1930s to the manic pixie dream girls of more recent vintage. (Plus, this is the kind of movie that communicates her creative free spirit by having her dress in a kooky parade of bright colors and clashing patterns.)