Ghost Town contains two decent comic sequences (both involving a misanthropic English dentist, Ricky Gervais, and both happening in the first 30 minutes), one decent performance (again, the English dentist), zero new ideas, and less than zero cinema.

The film is about a dentist who has a near-death experience and returns to life with—and this is the catch—a part of his soul still connected to the other world, the world of the dead, the world of the bucket kickers. The living dentist can see the dead. But the dead are not really dead; they are the damned. These men and women have died, but have not yet entered the void. They have failed to become what the universe has plenty of: nothing. Each instead roams the city (in this case Manhattan), trying to resolve the things that his or her sudden death left unfinished. He wants to contact his wife and let her know his deepest secrets; she wants to contact her son and let him know her truest feelings. And once the living understand the dead, the dead can really die.

The misanthropic dentist reluctantly becomes a medium between those who are here and those who are there, those who are material and those who are immaterial. But the film fails to raise the main question: Why do the dead want to really die? What's wrong with being a ghost? You have died, you are still around—you can haunt this street, that home, those shops. This order seems sensible enough: To be alive is the best, to be a ghost is not the worst, and to be nothing is unimaginable. Why, then, do ghosts want the unimaginable? Why?