textbook crowd-pleaser, for better or worse

Rating: 6/10 (22 November 2010)

Young Wall Street whiz kid Patrick Swayze is murdered but his spirit lingers on, earthbound until it can find the man who killed him and who still threatens bereaved girlfriend Demi Moore. You would think a dead man could afford to be fatalistic about such things, but Swayze wants revenge, and after a slow start (to both the film and his vendetta) he gets it, with reluctant help from a bogus medium (Whoopi Goldberg) able to hear his disembodied voice. The clever (and often eerie) effects help salvage the story from some predictable clichés and tired comic relief, and by the time Swayze joins that big Industrial Light and Magic show in the sky the film has carved itself a sizable chunk of territory once claimed exclusively by Steven Spielberg, who no doubt is kicking himself for making the similar but saccharine 'Always' instead. With a pair of more than simply photogenic stars the movie might have been a bubblegum classic; as it is, 'Ghost' succeeds in putting a warm afterglow around the afterlife.