With a standard plot and a lack of chemistry between Paul Rudd and Lake Bell, it’s just a matter of going through the motions.
By Bob Brown
THIS might have worked better as a TV sitcom episode. Stretched to an hour and a half, it’s mildly amusing, but there’s not enough meat on the bones to make a full course meal. It’s symptomatic of what’s happening in movie land nowadays. A lot of TV people are stretching themselves beyond their talents.
Take the director and screenwriter Jeff Lowell, for instance. He has plenty of credits as a producer and scriptwriter for light-entertainment television shows. But evidenced by this frothy comedy, he isn’t able to sustain things for the duration of a feature-length film.
The premise is one of the standard plots: the ghost-spouse who can’t get to the hereafter until she finishes business in the here and now. Kate (Eva Longoria Parker of Desperate Housewives) is a control freak who is killed by a falling ice-sculpture while nagging the caterers on her wedding day. Appropriately, the sculpture is an angel, carved by a drunken ice-sculptor (veteran character actor Stephen Root), who has made his figure wingless.
A year later, Kate’s fiancée, the veterinarian Henry (Paul Rudd), has still not come to terms with her death, so his sister, Chloe (TV regular Lindsay Sloane), drags him around to a psychic friend, Ashley (Boston Legal alumna Lake Bell). The idea is that Ashley will “receive” messages from the Beyond, whereby Kate will tell Henry to move on with this life. The psychic business is a little slow (as is Ashley), so Ashley does double duty with a partner, the klutzy Dan (Jason Biggs of American Pie), in a catering business.
Henry doesn’t buy the psychic nonsense, until Chloe feeds Ashley Kate’s diary, which contains secrets that only Kate and Henry would know. Impressed, Henry is soon seeing a lot more of Ashley. But the visits are less and less professional as the two start to fall for each other. The fly in the ointment is Kate, who returns to Earth as a ghost whom only Ashley can see and hear.
And far from urging Henry to move on, the jealous Kate is bent on making Ashley give him up. At every turn, Kate makes a fool of Ashley in public and disrupts her tete-à-tetes with Henry. But this isn’t earning Kate her wings to heaven as she had thought. And the ice-sculptor, who turns out also to be dead and visiting Earth to fulfill a last mission, hints that Kate must have missed the angel’s instructions on what her real mission is.
Of course we know as soon as Henry and Ashley meet that they are destined to clinch. But the script hasn’t been clever enough, nor the direction deft enough, to make up for the total lack of chemistry between Rudd and Bell. So it’s just a matter of going through the motions. What passes for humor is visual by the numbers. Got a dog that’s too heavy to lift onto the vet’s examining table? Check. Got mustard that will squirt all over a woman’s dress? Check. Got an extended flatulence joke? Oh, and can it spoil a romantic bedroom scene? Check and check.
And what to do with Dan, who hasn’t been pawing Ashley because, as he tells her, he’s gay? Got to have some tasteless gay jokes in there too. There are some talented comedic actors with too-brief cameos in the film, including Wendi McClendon-Covey (familiar from TV’s Reno 911) as the lady with an overweight pooch, and Kali Rocha (from Grey’s Anatomy) as an impatient angel.
The exteriors were all shot in and around Los Angeles and Long Beach, Calif., in sun-bleached, washed-out settings by John Bailey (Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants), whose work looks typical of most TV shows.
There’s a lot about this movie that isn’t objectionable: It isn’t violent, it isn’t raunchy (there’s not one four-letter word), no one smokes, no one is drinking heavily (even though there is one character who admits to doing so), and one character even promises to start attending church. Then again, there’s a lot about this movie that isn’t particularly good either: It isn’t very funny, it isn’t sexy, it isn’t witty, and it isn’t cinematically beautiful.
It is, however, long for its subject. Even in a day when two-hour features are not uncommon, an hour and half can seem like an eternity when there’s little to instruct, amuse or entertain. Mediocrity shouldn’t cost $8 a pop. It should be free. It should be short. And it is — on television.
Rated PG-13 for sexual content and language.