“”You’re going to think I’m crazy,”” Keanu Reeves says as Alex Burnham when trying to explain the relationship in “”The Lake House”” to his brother. Reeves is partly right in that you must be at least a little crazy to think that this movie could actually work.

Dr. Kate Forester is a lonely single woman moving out of her beloved lake house. She leaves behind a letter for the next tenants, briefly telling them how much she enjoyed her time there and asking them to forward her mail. The house’s next resident (or is it it’s first resident?), Alex, gets the letter and is slightly confused by it, seeing as how no one has lived in the house for years. Through correspondence through the mailbox at the house, they realize the answer for this is because they’re living two years apart, Alex in 2004 and Kate in 2006.

The two keep up the correspondence, beyond just the normal forwarding of the mail. Soon they’re discussing their likes and dislikes and the relationship blossoms into one of letter flirting. They decide to take simultaneous walks through the city, so even though they can’t physically be together, they can at least experience the same things.

Alex and Kate fall in love through their letters, but even they realize a relationship kept apart through such an immense distance is impossible; it means there’s a lot of waiting in store for them.

Many “”chick flicks”” feel like they run over the same well-worn territory, so I have respect for the writers in this film for coming up with a new twist to a relationship. This “”time distance”” relation is a huge plot hole to have to get past. The logistics simply don’t make sense. The way they correspond through the mailbox is that as soon as one puts a letter in the box during his or her time, the flag pops up in the other. So if Alex from the past writes Kate a letter in the future, shouldn’t the letter have been sitting in the mailbox for ages? Or if Kate just moved out of the house that she’s been living in for years, shouldn’t she have been in the house in 2004 in addition to Alex being there? It’s hard to see around all the confusion to enjoy the movie.

Another key part to whether this movie will work is if the audience wants Kate and Alex to get together in the end. It’s hard to create chemistry between the two characters if they can never be in the same space. What the creators try to do is place them in the same area but in different times and while they’re writing back and forth, the letters are more of a conversation. However, it contradicts the earlier part of “”The Lake House”” where they can only talk by using the mailbox. If they were really writing to each other, they’d have to be running back and forth between the mailbox constantly, instead of instantaneously speaking with each other.

By the end of the movie, it’s not this deep spark that makes us want Alex and Kate to be together. It’s a sense of obligation because of what we’re used to at the end of a movie. Reeves and Bullock have something missing in this relationship that they had in “”Speed””- a bomb. At least that would put them out of their misery of having to continually wait for the time to be right.