If one was to ask me a year ago who I
thought would best elevate the mediocre quality of a sitcommish
farce about an angry dentist who gets in touch with his softer
side when he discovers he can talk to ghosts after temporarily
dying at the hand of anesthesia, I might have cited Ghost
Town’s exact writer/director and cast. Who better than David
Koepp, the imaginative scribe of products as diverse as
Secret Window and Spider-Man, to lift a mundane idea
from its own shortcomings by providing its characters with
quirky personalities and its situations with clever ironies? And
who else but the dryly hysterical Ricky Gervais could fittingly
play the token pudgy, sardonic dentist at the center of the
action? The affable Greg Kinnear and the lovely Téa Leoni would
have probably come to mind as candidates for the respective
roles of Gervais’ (slightly irritating) ghost pal and his love
interest, too.
Even though
Ghost Town indeed fuses all of the wonderful talents of
its filmmaker and cast-members, it unfortunately still isn’t a
very good movie. Yes, Koepp, Gervais, Kinnear, and Leoni all
deliver in their particular roles—well, except for maybe Koepp,
who is responsible for at least half of the drab concept (he
co-wrote the film with John Kamps)—but the movie nonetheless
can’t help but feel minor and uninteresting in nature. Like its
aforementioned sitcommish premise, the film doesn’t strive for
much other than to mildly entertain its viewers for 100-minutes
and hence doesn’t achieve anything more than such a goal. (And,
seriously, would you knowingly fork over $10 to see a movie
that, however painless, represented nothing new to you? Only
seek out Ghost Town if the answer to that question is
“yes.”)
The movie
even manages to screw up what should be surefire winning
emotional-elements. For example: as likable as Gervais’
protagonist Bertram Pinkus may become as he learns what it means
to care for others—even those not living—there isn’t much of a
reason for the viewer to care for Bertram himself. Similar to
the whole of Ghost Town, Bertram the character never
quite overcomes the fact that he seems like a stock creation.
Even when he runs into entertaining amusements at various points
in the film’s plot—a scene in which he and Leoni’s character
analyze the dentition of a human-artifact comes to mind (yes,
it’s more charming than it sounds on paper)—these can’t help but
feel manufactured themselves because they are so clearly
intended to be “cute” interludes in a prefab whole.
I’m already
running out of things to say about Ghost Town a mere
three paragraphs into this review. The movie is pleasant for the
viewer while it lasts but will prove equally as unpleasant for
them when after seeing it they realize they wasted almost two
hours for nothing but shallow entertainment not unlike that
which could be seen for free on TV. Given that I no longer wish
to bask in such unpleasantness myself, I’ll merely conclude with
four words of caution on Ghost Town: wait for the DVD.
-Danny Baldwin, Bucket Reviews
Review Published on: 9.16.2008
Screened on: 9.9.2008 at the
Landmark in West Los Angeles, CA.
