Cast adrift in ghost of a plot

It's a good enough story. And Mark Ruffalo and Reese Witherspoon are certainly stars who can claim to be actors, too. But Mark Waters's film doesn't do them any favours. It's as flat as a pancake, as if nobody involved has much confidence in the Ghost-like plot.

David (Ruffalo) is a young man who has lost his wife and rents a San Francisco apartment with excellent views of the bay to try to get over it. He has the good fortune of a sexy neighbour (Ivana Milicevic) who, like him, wants a little comfort. She lets him know by leaving her thong in the corridor outside his shower room. But he has other fish to fry.

He has set his sights on a pretty girl (Witherspoon) who claims the flat is hers - and seems to be able to walk through walls. She's a kind of ghost; but she doesn't know it. While her other self is lying in a hospital bed in a coma after an accident, her phantom self thinks David has commandeered her flat.

Gradually the bickering pair begin to find each other attractive but they
have very little time before their prospects together look to be fading away.

I can't complain about the playing of the leads. But this is a case where a good director would have made all the difference. Instead, the film saunters along without a single distinguishing sequence.

While Ghost managed to get the emotions going, Just Like Heaven seems incapable of engaging anyone who doesn't just like to gaze admiringly at the two principals and wonder how it's all going to work out.

Just Like Heaven
Cert: certPG