This town is going like a ghost town (Ghost Town (DVD))

Member Name: SWSt

Product:	Ghost Town (DVD)
Date:	03/12/08 (111 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Gervais is on good form

Disadvantages: Weak, predictable script, non-existent support cast, inevitable mushy ending

Ghost Town is a little like the the nursery rhyme about the little girl who had a little curl. When it's good, it's very, very good, but when it's bad, it's horrid. OK, maybe that's a slight exaggeration, but hopefully, it gives you the idea that it's a film of mixture of some good things and some very average ones.

It's essentially been billed as The Sixth Sense with jokes, and that's a pretty apt description. Following a complication during a routine operation, grumpy dentist Bertram Pincus is suddenly able to see all the dead people who inhabit New York. The dead want help with their "unfinished business" and Bertram's the only one who can do it. The problem is, Bertram doesn't much like the living, let alone the dead.

There is one reason and one reason alone why this film works. That reason comes in the slightly portly form of Ricky Gervais, making a bid to break out of support roles and into the leading man category. Be warned, if you don't like Ricky Gervais, you will hate Ghost Town. He's not doing anything new here - he essentially takes aspects of all the characters he's played on the small screen (particularly borrowing from The Office and Extras, obviously) and rolls them up into Pincus, an unpleasant, sarcastic, mean-spirited man... or at least he should be. Just like Gervais did with David Brent, he takes what should be a dislikeable character and, and adds a dash of vulnerability, a splash of possible warmth and a glimpse of something softer underneath. Almost against our better wishes, this makes us sympathetic towards him. It's inevitable that Pincus is going to melt gradually throughout the film, but the fact is, you actually wouldn't care too much if he didn't.

In fact, many people will like Pincus at the start more than the finish. This is because few people do grumpy, cynical, embittered, sarcastic humour as well as Gervais, and it's this which creates the only reason why it's worth watching. Again, fans of The Office and Extras will recognise both the style of humour and the way in which it is delivered, but this is no bad thing. It's clear this script has been written with Gervais's strengths in mind, and he doesn't let us down. His delivery is perfect, his timing spot on and he can create genuinely big laughs from the most unlikely of phrases or situations. Quite simply, Gervais single-handedly keeps this film afloat and makes it watchable. Without him, it would simply be a pile of dull, predictable dross. After the series of recent, insipid, so-called comedies Hollywood should sit up and take notice: there's a man in town who can actually make people laugh.

Of course, the downside to this is that if you don't like Gervais and his style of humour, or if you feel it's grown a little old and tired, then you're not going to like Ghost Town, because there is precious little else to recommend it.

As you can probably tell, the rest of the cast don't fare terribly well. Greg Kinnear is stuck in a thankless task as Frank Herlihy, the ghost trying to get Gervais to stop his widow marrying her new fiancé (you can probably see where the plot is heading already...) Tea Leoni is sidelined as Gwen, the said love interest and, whilst she manages to show a few sparky moments, she's pretty much saddled with the traditional female role and doesn't get a chance to show off many acting or comedy skills.

The plot, too, is highly hum-drum and predictable. Take away the supernatural element (which is never really played up to its full potential) and what you have here is, essentially a traditional rom-com. Bertram and Gwen don't get on, then they do, then they fall out again, then... Oh, you can probably work the rest out for yourself. We're not exactly talking complicated here - it's pretty much a by-the-numbers, depressingly predictable rom-com, which only doesn't become nauseating because you're laughing too much at Gervais's antics.

To say that there isn't much character development is also a bit of an understatement. Clearly, as far as writer David Koepp is concerned, this is something other people need to worry about. His characters are utterly unrealistic. This particularly applies to Pincus. When we first meet him, he's a grumpy, bad tempered dentist with absolutely no people skills. Then Frank asks him to help out and he suddenly becomes a nice person in the space of one scene, capable of charming Frank's widow with just a few well-chosen words. Similarly, she thinks he's rude and boorish, but instantly laughs at his jokes. Like I said, complicated or realistic it ain't.

Then, there's how Bertram and Gwen initially get together. This is possibly the most contrived meeting in film history (or, indeed, history full stop.) They get together... wait for it... over a decayed corpse. Nope, I'm not joking! Gwen is a museum expert in mummies and untrained Bertram manages to impress her by discovering a whopping great big clue as to how the mummy died that all the other experts have missed. From that point on, Bertram becomes warm(ish) and and Gwen starts to respond to him. Yawn. Normally, it's at this point in rom-coms that I get bored. It's at this stage that such films lose all credibility and get to the point where the "rom" starts to take over from the "com" and things just descend into vomit-inducing territory. Thankfully (again solely due to Gervais) this doesn't happen. He still manages to mine quite a lot of laughs from the rest of the film before it settles down to its inevitable, hugely unrealistic and predict conclusion.

There's no doubt that Ghost Town is a flawed and inconsistent film. There are moments of brilliant comedy and there were several occasions when I laughed out loud and a plenty more that brought a smile to my face. But no matter how good Gervais is, he can't carry a 100 minute film all on his own, which is what he is left to do. Even coming in at a relatively slim 102 minutes, it still starts to run out of steam well before the end and become depressingly predictable. Still, our Ricky does save the day and has once again shown that no-one can do world-weary sarcasm as well as a short, fat, middle-aged, middle class English person. As a showcase for his undoubted comedic talent, Ghost Town does at least serve a purpose. It shows that, given the right script and allowed to do what he's best at, Gervais can cut it as a main character in Hollywood.

Basic Information
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Ghost Town
2008
Director: David Koepp
Running time: approx. 102 minutes
Certificate: 12A

© Copyright SWSt 2008

Summary: Thank goodness for Ricky Gervais!