Ghost Town (12A) (From Basingstoke Gazette)

Ghost Town review

8:58am Thursday 23rd October 2008 in Reviews By Joanne Mace

IT'S A shame that the majority of American audiences didn't give Ghost Town a chance to make an impression on them.

But hopefully it won't meet the same fate here, as this quirky and really rather lovely film is very much worth seeing.

Just get your issues with Ricky Gervais' fang-like teeth out of the way early on, and be glad that he has refused to pander to Hollywood's penchant for fake, straight, bleached gnashers. The reason I mention his teeth at all is because, as you might already be aware, in Ghost Town he plays a dentist called Bertram Pincus.

Bertram is a total misanthropist, not a people person at all, who's also a bit of a control freak and an obsessive compulsive. He has a minor procedure in hospital but suffers an alarming side-effect - people who claim to be dead realise he can see them, and so they start harassing him.

Returning to the hospital, he interrogates his surgeon (a brilliant Kristen Wiig, who's a Saturday Night Live regular) and discovers that he died for seven minutes on the operating table before being resuscitated.

While this little nugget of information is digesting, one persistent dead person, Frank Herlihy (Greg Kinnear), threatens to let all the dead people of New York know about his ability to see - and therefore help them - unless Bertram stops his wife Gwen (Tea Leoni) from getting married again to someone Frank believes is a fraud.

Can Bertram get over his aversion to human contact and get Frank off his case at the same time?

Directed by David Koepp, who's best known as a top-drawer Hollywood screenwriter (Jurassic Park, Spider-Man and so on), Ghost Town manages to be completely charming, easily overcoming the fact that Gervais looks like no one's idea of a leading man.

He does his usual schtick, to an extent, but thankfully, we see his character through the eyes of Gwen long enough for it to be remotely plausible that someone would possibly fancy him, and want to spend more time with him, despite his strangeness.

Leoni is the absolute star of the show, making it even more mysterious that she achieves proper leading lady status so rarely these days. Just as she was the warm beating heart of the Nicolas Cage vehicle The Family Man, she achieves something similar here, giving a wonderful, earthily sexy performance.

Despite the odd cheesy line, there are some great moments throughout Ghost Town's nicely-judged running time, including a great last scene to send you home beaming. Perfect heartwarming stuff for these nippy, impoverished times.