It takes an awful lot of effort for
a contemporary comedy to win an audience back after opening with yet another
"Holy crap, that guy just got hit by a bus!" scene, but Ghost Town perseveres, and eventually emerges
as a likeable time-waster, albeit more sweet than funny. The bus-victim in Ghost
Town's opening
scene is Greg Kinnear, a stock "asshole New York businessman" who's working on
buying a love-nest for his mistress when the city's mass-transit system gets
the better of him. Now reduced to quietly haunting ex-wife Téa Leoni, Kinnear
sees a ray of hope when he meets a living man who can talk to the dead, and
potentially help Kinnear sort out his unfinished business on earth. The
problem? The ghost-talker is irascible dentist Ricky Gervais, who wants nothing
to do with the legion of spirits who've been hassling him ever since a
near-death experience gave him the gift.
Pretty much everything about this
afterlife comedy is straight-from-the-shelf save for Gervais, typically
hilarious as a misanthrope who organizes his work and his private life so he
doesn't have to talk to anyone. Predictably, Gervais becomes smitten with Leoni
while trying to get Kinnear off his back, and once the romance starts, any
trace of edge in Ghost Town vanishes like an apparition. Still, though the plot
contrives to throw Gervais and Leoni together and then pull them apart, the two
leads stay consistently in sync through it all, laughing at each other's jokes
and generally sharing the kind of normal adult communication that's often
missing from movies about people falling in love.
Ghost Town is somewhat of a wasted
opportunity, in that the premise of an irritable Gervais dealing with the last requests
of a city full of troubled ghosts gets pushed onto the back burner for most of
the running time, so Kinnear's problems can take precedence. Had
writer-director David Koepp and his screenwriting collaborator John Kamps
enlivened the romantic-comedy clichés with more supernatural whimsy—à la Groundhog
Day—then
Gervais might've found a superior showcase for his talents. At least the
premise returns in force in Ghost Town's last 20 minutes, giving the movie a touching
send-off, and Gervais more opportunities to fumble along amusingly, making
inexcusably embarrassing comments, then getting people back on his side with
the pathos in his sunken eyes.