To the director Michael Fimognari’s credit, “P.S. I Still Love You” doesn’t condescend to Lara Jean’s dilemma even as her choices deserve popcorn pelted at the screen. Yet, he’s content with a product that seems beamed in from a staticky old channel. Despite Condor’s determination to make Lara Jean feel like a real girl — albeit with distracting false eyelashes — she’s stuck being a clone, opening the film crooning “And Then He Kissed Me” to her bedroom mirror just as Elisabeth Shue did in “Adventures in Babysitting.” Later, when Lara Jean’s loyalty is divided by the reappearance of her sixth-grade crush (Jordan Fisher), an emotionally-attuned dork who, like her, prefers to spend his Saturdays playing bingo, the soundtrack broods with a moody cover of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.”

How canny to capitalize on a youthful ache to rewind to an era when Molly Ringwald wasn’t forced to worry about school shootings and climate change. (The year Nixon resigned, 1974, TV viewers made a hit out of “Happy Days.”) Fimognari, promoted from the job of cinematographer on the first installment, occasionally cribs a shot from a more ambitious movie: a floating kiss; a pair of snow angels; an argument on a class trip to the aquarium filmed before a tank of bioluminescent jellyfish, recalling a James Bond brawl in “Skyfall.” Mostly, however, the visuals are childish, with saturated tinting that has to be squinted through, as though a lollipop melted on the lens.

Ironically, the film’s best sequences are wish fulfillment for geriatrics. Lara Jean’s retro fixation reaches its peak when she volunteers at Belleview, a retirement home with fortune tellers, posh soirees and a former Pan Am flight attendant named Stormy (Holland Taylor) lording over the palm-frond fantasia like a screwball grande dame. The rooms are art deco, the wardrobes are doo-wop, and the residents groove to the Bee Gees. Pass the prune daiquiris — yes, there are prune daiquiris — and get drunk on nostalgia.

To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You

Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes.