Ghost Town
"Come on, sock!" pleaded the former Soupboy, 
"Come see my new picture!"
"I don't know..." I hesitated. "Is it anything like "Bad News Bears" or "Godsend" or "Dear God" or--"
"No!" he interrupted. "This one's good! I play this ghost see, who doesn't want my widow to marry this rotten nasty lawyer guy, so I contact this nasty dentist guy who, because he was clinically dead for seven minutes during an operation can now see ghosts to get a message to my wife."
"Whoopie Goldberg's not in it, is she?"
"No! I swear she's not." Kinnear promised. "Come on, you have a movie review website! When was the last time you actually saw a movie?"
I thought about it a moment. His wife, the lovely Helen, broke the silence. 
"Please go or he'll sulk all week." she said.
"Okay," I agreed. "I'll go."
"I'm looking through you..." Greg sang softly along with the opening titles as the film began.
"Quiet!" I demanded. "I'm trying to watch the movie!"
"Ooooh. Don't I look sharp in that tux?" he gushed breathlessly as the film's first scene played.
"Yes, but that blue screen bus bit looked worse than the stuff we did on "Talk Soup"." I pointed out.
"Just watch the movie." he frowned.
Greg plays Frank Herlihy, a man ("In a tuxedo!" Greg asked me to add) who is killed early in the picture. He meets Bertram Pincus (Ricky Gervais, looking like he stole my friend Karl Tiedemann's wardrobe) a sour anti-social dentist who gains the ability to see and communicate with the dead after a colonostomy operation goes bad and he is clinically dead for seven minutes. Frank wants to get Bertram to break up his widow Gwen's (Tea Leoni!) new relationship with Richard (Bill Campbell) who he thinks is out to take her for her dough. The trouble is, the word spreads and there's a lot of other ghosts who want Pincus to carry out missions for them too!
Of course as we go along Pincus starts to fall for Gwen while Frank heckles, coaches and wisecracks unseen to anyone but Pincus and other spirits.
The problem is Pincus is such a unlikeable character, its hard to pull for him. It's not until the second half of the film that the script by David Koepp really kicks into gear and hits some good emotional buttons and throws in some unexpected twists. Even then, it never really gets breakout funny. There is a good scene where Pincus talks to his doctor about his near-death experience in the company of the hospital doctor, but its more clever than really funny. There's an admittance scene with a nurse ("Not Necessarily the News" vet Audrey Neenan) that looks like its supposed to be funny, but its not. It only succeeds in playing up Pincus' annoying character. Kinnear is always entertaining being smug and cocky, but actually his best scenes in this are when he plays it from the heart. Ditto Tea Leoni, 
who shows once more why husband David Duchovny is a sex addict. Yum.
As a buddy film, "Ghost Town" fails because of the lack of chemistry between Gervais and Kinnear. They are both talented performers, but they have little fireworks together. Perhaps Gervais needed a different vehcile to first introduce him to American audiences before giving us such a irritating, sour character to begin with--kind of build up some good will as it were. Certain special effects in this film really are worse than what we did on "Talk Soup" where we spent all of 20 minutes and a dime on our blue sceen scenes.
If the first half of the film were as good as the second half, I think "Ghost Town" would have been a much bigger hit than it has proved to be. Instead it seems like a movie that stopped in the theaters to pick up a bag of popcorn on its way to a DVD future.
"So?" Kinnear asked hopefully as the lights came back up.
"Well..."
"That's okay."he interrupted. "I have a new one coming out next week."
"Then why did you make me sit through this???" I demanded.
"The next one will look so much better by comparison."
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