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Movies Forum Index » Movie Reviews Forum » Review: Ghost Town (2008)...
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| Mark R. Leeper... |
 Posted: Wed Oct 01, 2008 11:25 pm |
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GHOST TOWN
(a film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: A dentist who died for seven minutes on
the operating table finds that he now can see
dead people. Half of Manhattan has favors they
want of him and making matters worse, it is the
dead half. Ricky Gervais, popular star of BBC
TV's "The Office", plays the man who doesn't like
living people and now has also to deal with the
dead. He is asked by a dead husband to break up
his wife's relationship with a new fiance. The
first half has some very good writing, but the
film loses its center and wanders in its second
half. Rating: +2 (-4 to +4) or 7/10
GHOST TOWN is a supernatural comedy-drama for which the comedy
elements, mostly connected with the premise, are pointed and work.
The dramatic elements are a little unfocussed. This makes for a
film with a great first act, and good but faulty second act and a
weak conclusion. The film was co-written and directed by David
Koepp. Koepp has been connected with some major fantasy films,
usually as a writer. Koepp's writing can be found in JURASSIC
PARK, THE SHADOW, MISSION IMPOSSIBLE, STIR OF ECHOES, SPIDER-MAN,
WAR OF THE WORLDS (Spielberg version), ZATHURA, and INDIANA JONES
AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL. Those are fairly major
fantasy films. Here he tells a romantic story seemingly based on
the premises of GHOST and especially THE SIXTH SENSE.
Like Cole Sear of THE SIXTH SENSE, Bertram Pincus (Ricky Gervais)
sees dead people. It is the after-effect of dying on an operating
table for nearly seven minutes before being revived. Bertram sees
the dead like Sear does, but there are not just a few unquiet
spirits like we saw in THE SIXTH SENSE. This is Manhattan and
there are throngs of the dead who have been waiting around for some
living person to get the power to hear them. Each has a mission
before he or she moves onto the next existence. Bertram just has
to do one or two little things for each of them. Bertram could
spend the rest of his life performing important services for the
unquiet dead. Complicating matters is the fact that Bertram is
just not someone who does a lot of favors. In fact, Bertram is a
self-obsessed jerk who would just rather not be around people. He
chose being a dentist as a profession because sticking cotton or
metal into a patient's mouth generally ends conversations. He has
a hard enough time putting up with the living people in his life,
and he is less than happy about being the key man for so many dead
people. They hound him and they follow him around. The novelty of
this situation somewhat compensates for the overuse of the old gag
of someone trying to cover up the fact that he is talking to
someone that nobody else sees. That one got old along with the
"Topper" films.
Chief among Bertram's haunters is Frank Harley (Greg Kinnear). On
the day that Frank's wife Gwen (Tea Leoni) discovered Frank was
leading a double life, both lives came to an end. Frank wants to
make sure that the Gwen does not marry a certain creep, but being
dead his options are limited. He stalks and hounds Bertram hoping
to use him to save his wife. Not too surprisingly Bertram finds he
has an interest in her himself. In the second half the film loses
impetus and direction. We have three main characters, one living,
one dead, one lost a little in between. But none of these
characters seems to know what he or she wants. Instead, the
tension comes from not knowing if Gwen will find out that Bertram
is seeing her dead ex-husband (literally seeing him).
Fans of Ricky Gervais--and some people who do not care for him--
know him as the boorish office manager in the BBC comedy series
"The Office." Koepp gets a somewhat more restrained performance
from him for most of GHOST TOWN'S runtime. There are moments when
his TV persona does seem to creep back on him. This is a film that
takes the idea of THE SIXTH SENSE and makes a passable comedy out
of it by examining what it would mean to an average man to have the
power. As long as we are getting clever ideas about what it would
mean to see the dead, the GHOST TOWN is a lot of fun. When it
tries to become more serious the film falters and loses its center.
Still I rate it a +2 on the -4 to +4 scale or 7/10.
Film Credits: <http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0995039/>
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper at (no spam) optonline.net
Copyright 2008 Mark R. Leeper |
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