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.