I’m guessing that we have running time restrictions to thank for British New York dentist Bertram Pincus being instantly irritated at the sight of the living dead, rather than ever showing the slightest hint of amazement or fear, as would be the assumed first reactions. But Ghost Town is such a clean switch from horror to romantic comedy using a standard horror theme that every last trace of scariness is cleanly and completely severed, often leaving a gaping hole in the logic of the plot.

The movie immediately presents itself as a shallow rip-off of what is now little more than a sound bite from The Sixth Sense, where Cole reveals his startling secret, but it’s another scene entirely that the movie extends from. Remember that scene where Cole finally decides to listen to the ghosts and see what they want from him, and that little girl gives him a videotape of her babysitter feeding her drain cleaner and making her sick? Ghost Town is that scene fleshed out into a full length romantic comedy with the curious addition of an angry British dentist thrown into the middle of it.

There are amusing moments and romantic moments, and even some emotional moments, but none as effective as you would think, given how tirelessly hilarious British aggravation is. There are twists and turns that have to do with the characters’ personalities rather than the plot, which is refreshing, but

It's comforting to think that our lost loved ones are still here with us, but not so much when other people's lost loved ones really ARE here with us.

the movie still leaves you with the feeling that it’s a lot of tired American themes with the arbitrary addition of a British dentist living in New York and desperately hating any kind of contact with any other human being.

It seems that during a routine surgical procedure, the unfortunately named Bertram Pincus (whose name itself sounds like something that needs to be surgically removed) actually “dies” for several minutes, leaving him with the ability to see and communicate with dead people.

We never really learn why he hates human contact so much, we only know that he lives his life in a perpetual state of annoyance directed toward other people, and the new ability to see dead people doesn’t make it any better. In fact, as soon as the dead realize that Pincus is a door through which they can communicate with the living, they converge on him, overwhelming him with a barrage of requests that range from delivering letters to killing people.

Enter Greg Kinnear, who plays Frank Herlihy, a recently deceased man who’s death opens the movie and is one of the film’s best and most cleverly orchestrated scenes.

An unfortunately dead Frank Herlihy watches helplessly as his wife passes before someone else's eyes.

By methods whose description is limited to “I’ll talk to them,” Frank promises to forever relieve Pincus of his harassment by the dead if he’ll do one little thing for him - his own widow is about to marry someone that Frank can’t stand, and he wants Pincus to prevent the wedding.

See what I mean about tired American themes? But what complicates matters is that Frank is not the greatest guy in the world himself, and his widow’s fiance, despite coming off as a massive tool, might not be the terrible person that we all expect our ex’s to date after we break up. And strangely, this is where the movie becomes highly predictable but also goes in new directions. It’s nice to see the expected personalities reversed, but the rest of the movie is still the same character transformation from a grumpy grinch into a singing ray of sunshine that we’ve seen a thousand times since The Christmas Carol.

Tea Leoni plays Gwen, the widow, and what a life she’s had. She lost her husband in a violent accident, fell in love and became engaged to someone else, and then became interested in someone else before the wedding. It’s a strange little detail that she is romantically involved, at various levels, with every male lead in the movie.

I kid you not, Gwen is showing Pincus a reportedly enormous 5,000-year-old mummified penis in this particular scene.

But what makes the movie frustrating is that they make Pincus such an effectively unlikeable guy - particularly in one of his first scenes, where he stares with shocked irritation at a co-worker who has the nerve to invite him to celebrate the expectancy of his first child - that it becomes impossible to understand or respect Gwen’s almost immediate romantic interest in him, after the obligatory acknowledgement and then dismissal of his spotless record of being a total ass to her.

And then there’s the comedy, which is wildly inconsistent. There are a few laugh out loud moments (including one where Pincus talks about the Chinese people being the odd ones out in the world because they name their kids things like Kwok and Pong and Wang, although I’ve lived in China for the last year and a half and have yet to run into a Kwok or a Pong), but others that fall completely flat and still go on and on and on with no end in sight. There’s a scene where Pincus and his doctor try to talk but keep interrupting each other that is so over-extended that it looks like a series of outtakes.

In an effort to learn about extracting information from captives, social butterfly Bertram Pincus politely asks a co-worker if he's from "one of those scary countries."

All of the necessary ingredients are here for a cute and clever romantic comedy, but a lot of people will be disappointed that the movie follows such a clear formula and never approaches topics dealing with Pincus’s character change that go beyond a simple ability to interact with other people. In a movie about salvation and the afterlife, I’m surprised that these are the deepest issues dealt with. The tear-jerking in the film’s conclusion almost becomes too cheesy, but it may very well get you choked up, too.

Incidentally, I’m not sure what this implies about Ghost Town’s target or potential audiences, but when I saw it today, I looked around the mostly empty theater and noticed that there were five other guys in the theater besides myself who were there to see it alone. Usually I’m the only one!