THE PLOT
After Kevin finds a ghost named Ernest haunting his new home, he becomes an overnight social media sensation. But when Kevin and Ernest go rogue to investigate the mystery of the latter’s past, they become targets of the CIA.
QUICK REVIEW
I was hoping that after nearly two months of bad traffic, schedule mismatches, and the like causing me to miss more than a few advanced screenings that this would be the week to get me back on track. But as they say “Man plans, God laughs” and I was finally hit with COVID causing me to be unable to attend any theatrical screening until the next weekend. So until then I can only account for my thoughts/reviews for streaming releases, and we have one this week in Netflix’s We Have A Ghost.
Directed by the same mind behind such horror-comedies like Happy Death Day, this feels like a teenage version of one of those Disney channel original movies those of us nineties kids grew up on around Halloween time. Except this is late February, and it features two major names in Anthony Mackie and David Harbour - not to mention a cameo from Jennifer Coolidge which I found so unexpected I choked on my soda when she came on screen.
I’ll give the movie a couple positives. It did have some interesting setups and concepts to play with. It did get me to chuckle more than a few times. I actually was curious enough to see how things would play out. I was very impressed with a big reveal for the big climax. I really appreciated the direction and camera work. There’s plenty glimpses in here of a solid movie.
But unfortunately the movie’s writing keeps getting in its own way. There’s no clear tone. There’s segments that feel rushed and out of place. There’s character motivations that are barely explored. There’s moments that feel like they were written by someone else than the rest of the film. Its as if somebody either put a bunch of ideas together with no attempt at true cohesion, or as if a rough draft was never followed up with any attempts at polishing it up. Leaving us with a pretty, bland, generic, and inevitably forgettable film.
As I mentioned earlier, I really think there was more potential to this movie than the final product we got. But either hubris, laziness, apathy, or a mixture of all three lead to the worst version we could’ve gotten. I wouldn’t say I hated this as much as other fellow critics seemed to, but this is easily going to make the list of movies I completely forgot existed by year’s end.
INTIAL GRADING