Ghost Town

It takes a good while for Ricky Gervais to warm up in Ghost Town; it takes even longer for the audience to warm to Ricky Gervais as a dentist named Bertrand who sees dead people as a side effect of having briefly died on an operating table. Director and co-writer David Koepp, more or less remaking his 1999 film Stir of Echoes as a romantic comedy, does little to break with the genre's conventions. But Ghost Town, dead on arrival throughout much of its first half, picks up as it slows down — when it ditches the dreary romantic shtick of the living and focuses, however briefly, on the needy, aching dead.