When there's something strange...
In your neighborhood...
Who ya gonna call?
The Story:
Nick (Ryan Reynolds) is a cop who gets killed by his partner (Kevin Bacon). Suddenly he finds himself landing a new gig in the Rest in Peace Department. He is teamed with Roy (Jeff Bridges), a wild west lawman who's been doing this for years, but hates having partners. Too bad, so sad, because the boys are going to have to learn to work together, and fast, if they want to prevent the impending apocalypse!
So, why does everyone hate this movie?
I don't know.
The trailers made it look like Ghostbusters meets Men in Black.
Mission accomplished.
The premise is fun: the dead that refuse to leave this world are hunted by the spirit world's best cops.
It's a supernatural buddy cop film!
The cops of course look different to us humans: Nick is a Chinese man (James Hong) and Roy is a woman (Marisa Miller). The effect is used to amusing potential throughout the movie.
However, therein lies the problem with a film with so much promise to its premise. There was a lot of great potential to this story to live up to Ghostbusters or Men in Black...
And it never quite makes it.
It's fun, but not FUN! It's good, but not GREAT!
When you aim to be an amalgam of two science fiction/comedy classics, you've got to pull out all of the stops and not just rely on upgraded special effects to wow the audiences.
That said, the leading men, especially Bridges though, seem to enjoy what they are doing and give a fun performance as lawmen from the other side of the pearly gates. Reynolds is shoehorned into the straight man role, and maybe that's part of the problem.
His mouth and sarcastic wit are his selling points, and when you have him playing the straight man reacting to the new crazy world that he's thrust into, he doesn't get to react as cleverly as he should, or at least, as audiences expect him too.
While it's not the greatest movie of the year, it is nowhere near the worst movie ever to grace the multiplex as many people seemed to think this year.
It's a movie with unrealized potential that could have been much better, but the bar maybe was set too high going into it.
The trailer told us too much, and made the comparisons inevitable.
Sometimes less is more, that would have been good advice for the trailer.
Sometimes less is less. That might just sum up the movie.
Final Grade: C+ish
Rewatchability/Purchase Factor: I picked it up from Blockbuster sight unseen, not having done that in ages. Don't regret the purchase, just wish there had been more for me to like.
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