Nice attempt, falls flat on its face.

Rating: 2/10 (11 October 1999)

I'm baffled by the popularity of this film -- it is excruciatingly slow, only halfway through it do we find out anything of interest (that the boy can see ghosts), the plot of the movie starts flat and stays flat throughout (the final twist at the end excepted, but that, in my mind, does not save the two hours of drudgery), and the characters seem uniformly one-dimensional. The little boy talks more like an adolescent that he could not be (his performance is good; it's the writing that's not believable), and throughout I felt instead of touched, emotionally manipulated (here's the music for you to feel moved, never mind that the dialogue and the situation is thoroughly cheesy). The story means well, but it feels like the screenwriter's bad first draft -- it needed substantial polishing. If you decide to see this film, know that you're in for a fake, manufactured experience without satisfactory plot development or resolution.