Could this be the most reliable movie that the year has seen? I think so. This is the very definition of a star vehicle, in this case, for Ricky Gervais. You take a kind of movie that’s been done dozens of times before, in an exhaustive variety of styles (from the romantic Ghost to the nightmare Sixth Sense), and you simply insert the actor to be, err, vehicled … and if that actor is, like Gervais, pervasive enough, he will affect the whole production and make it somehow original. Which is pretty much what happens here.

Gervais is really left to his own devices, and as such your mileage will vary on the humour depending on what you think of him so far. That said, I think the movie will win over even his dissenters if only for the fact it allows Aasif Mandvi to tell him just exactly what those dissenters think of his comedy. I wonder, however, if those people might emerge from the movie with the mistaken impression that the one person who might benefit from its slightly clichéd message – Gervais himself – might change his ways, lol.

For me however, Gervais is not the star here. What makes a repeat viewing certain for me here is Tea Leoni, whose brilliance I’m always forgetting. Like Gervais’ improv, there are moments here with Leoni that clearly “just happened” and were left in because, well, they’re beautiful – my favourite being a moment where she’s trying to brush her oversized dog’s teeth in the bathtub. Some people might see that small snippet of film as a simple slapstick gag, but I just saw pure joy that’s kind of hard for me to explain. I thought she was wonderful in this movie, and I can’t wait to see it again just for her.

Tags: comedy, ghosts

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008 at 2:35 pm and is filed under 3 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.