Just Like Heaven

Mark Waters who gave us the great Freaky Friday and Mean Girls in the past 2 years directs Just Like Heaven as his 2005 entry. With a Ghost like story but as a comedy, the movie fails completely despite a very good performance by Mark Ruffalo.

Reese Witherspoon plays Elizabeth Martinson, a young woman who devotes her life to her job, she a doctor. And when I say devotes I mean it, as when the movie starts she's finishing a 26 hours shift, not because she has to, but because she doesn't have anything better to do, plus she wants to work a lot to get a promotion which she ends up getting. So after the good news she's finally sent home, and then boom!, a car accident.
Now we meet David Abbott (Ruffalo), a former landscaping architect who moves in Elizabeth's apartment which has been without a tenant for months. Some family tragedy her realtor tells him. And so he moves in, and drinks beer and more beer, as we learn that he used to be married and is clearly depressed something that happened.
Soon Elizabeth shows up wanting to know what is he doing in her apartment, which is the same thing he wants to know. That's when we learn about Elizabeth's fate after the car accident. She's a ghost now and only David can see her for some reason. This prompts him to do all kind of crazy things like exorcisms, until he hires a psychic named Darryl who believes him, and though he can't see her, he feels she's there, and so he advises David to try and find out what's going on.

Now, something interesting and smart could be done with that setup, or they could've gone for the predictable but still funny and with heart which usually ends up with good results. But the filmmakers went with the predictable and lame instead, as they finally come to terms about her being dead, try to find out what's going on, eventually fall in love, but using the lamest lines and situations possible, ending with the classic Lame Line d'Or: "You saved my life" to which he replies, "No, you saved mine". And that's when I wanted to die.

As I mentioned before, Ruffalo is really good, in the comedic scenes as well as in the few dramatic scenes like when he tells Elizabeth what happened with his marriage.
Ruffalo's been getting some negative comments about his film choices lately, as she goes back and forth between romantic comedies and dramas, and apparently people didn't like the comedies but I really liked View from the Top and 13 Going on 30 so he's fine in my book. One of the best actors working today in my opinion. He's got Rumor Has It (with Jennifer Aniston and Kevin Costner) and All the King's Men (with Sean Penn, Jude Law and a lot more big names) coming out this year.

Witherspoon is back after a bad couple of years (Legally Blonde 2 and Vanity Fair) and she is the disappointment here in the lead. She doesn't look as beautiful as she really is and she gets really bad lines of dialogue. The character is general is pretty bad written as she doesn't question many things, like when she enters David's body like they do in Ghost. It happens only once here, for nothing important, and then they just forgot about it seems. Like the filmmakers didn't want to look too much like Ghost. They shouldn't have used it in the first place.

Now I don't want to trash the genius that is his Napoleon Dynamite, but Jon Heder plays Darryl the psychic and he is not convincing at all. His lines all seem forced and like he doesn't want to sound like Napoleon but at the same time he wants to sound all laid back and cool. And his repeated use of the word 'righteous' got annoying very soon. For all those who wanted to see the movie just for him, he's there for maybe just 12 minutes but he's got 2 or 3 scenes in which he leads and then 2 more showings.

Witherspoon is playing June Carter in the Johnny Cash biopic next, which will fight for the Oscars, but she'll need to be really good there for me to forgive her for this movie. With no chemistry between the two leads, a nothing soundtrack (which usually helps this kind of movies), and a horrible ending, Just Like Heaven comes off very lame and it just plain sucks.