On the Big Board |
| Position |
Staff |
In Brief |
| 9/196 |
Max Braden |
This is a genre film with no real surprises, but Gervais is very funny. |
| 14/31 |
Les Winan |
Very, very funny. It's a shame Gervais' first starring role was so poorly marketed. |
Ricky Gervais is a very, very annoying man. At least, that's what you'd gather from watching his characters, primarily in the TV series The Office (the cringe-inducing British original) and Extras, in which he played variations on the same boorish, tactless buffoon. A huge star in the UK and a moderate one in North America, he gets his first leading man role in Ghost Town, presumably playing yet another variation on his standard buffoon.
Seemingly taking its cue from Whoopi Goldberg's character in Ghost, it has Gervais play a man who briefly dies in the dentist chair, and finds that when he wakes up, he can both see and talk to ghosts. And they want things. One, in particular, played by Greg Kinnear, seems to
have it in for Gervais's fiancée, played by Tea Leoni, though in the same shoes, I'd probably tell the ghost to shove off already.
Premises don't get much more hackneyed than this, but there are a lot of very simple and tired premises that have turned to gold in the hands of the right people. Gervais is definitely someone who can turn nothing into something, and writer/director David Koepp is someone
who's at least familiar with quality, although this is his first foray into comedy. (Reagen Sulewski/BOP)
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