Movie Review - Ghost Town

I'll start by saying I don't like Ricky Gervais and have never found him funny so this was going to have to be phenomenal to impress me. As far as I can recall I've only ever seen Greg Kinnear (playing Frank) in "Stuck On You" which I found mildly funny.

Its hard to tell exactly what genre this film was aiming for as it misses comedy by a country mile and it wasn't really romantic enough to be a romcom, the humour (what little there was of it) wasn't really dark enough to be black comedy and its a movie about dead people so its not exactly a feel good flick either so I'd have to class this as an ego pic, solely written for Gervais to front.

Fortunately for me Frank dies in the very 1st scene, Gervais plays Bertam Pincus, a dentist (I find it hard to believe he's a comedian so I really struggled to accept him playing a dentist) who is also a complete asshole (Gervais is VERY believable as an asshole) who goes into hospital for some sort of routine bowel operation.

The operation itself is very quickly glossed over as you pass from him going to surgery to being discharged from hospital within mere seconds of each other. But Pincus is soon followed home by an ever increasing group of people who realise only he can see them who then procede to chase him. He returns to the hospital asking about hallucinations and eventually forces the surgeon to admit that he died for 7 minutes and can suddenly see dead people.

Pincus refuses to help any of the dead with their unfinished business so they spend the movie generally hounding and following him, Pincus is asked by Frank to help his widow Gwen (Tea Leoni) from marrying another guy which Pincus does by trying to woo her himself which is difficult as he has absolutely no personality and zero clue how to talk to people.

My 1st laugh in the film wasn't anything Gervais said, it was the fact he'd worn a new shirt and forgotten to remove the label. I guess it should speak volumes about how unfunny the man is if that made me laugh. Mainly what I found about Gervais was he's very boring, his whole performance was pretty much delivered in monotone with no life at all (ironic for a guy who can see dead people you'd think but in his case case, not so).

Despite the fact we see at least several dozen ghosts follow Pincus near the start of the movie we only ever get to meet a select few and thats one of the less satisfying things about this movie (In my opinion it shows they weren't able to develop their characters or write material for them, either that or they wanted the movie to revolve solely around Gervais & Kinnear which given Gervais' ego is the more likely reason).

Pincus asking the Indian dentist about "extracting information from a hostile" is extremely offensive and very bigoted in its assumption that all Indians are terrorists (I'm rather surprised Gervais as a Brit agreed to do that line as Britain is a very multi cultural country) and Pincus then abuses his position as a Dentist to both extract information and break up Gwens relationship. Even when Frank screws Pincus over you still don't feel sorry for him, Gervais just doesn't illict that response as an actor or a person.

His Indian colleague hits it spot on when he describes him as "a fucking prick" which finally leads Pincus to go on missions of mercy for the ghosts who have been following him, helping them with their unfinished business (which in itself is rather sad as they choose to spend less than 2 minutes of the movie doing that and I would have prefered to have seen much more of him helping the ghosts out).

It does feel quite satisfactory that Pincus gets killed (and in the exact same way that Frank did) but rather sadly is revived. The ending is left very open, you have no clue if Pincus still sees ghosts but he does seem to be slightly nicer and Frank did pass over.