Sigh. One might want to bash “Just Like Heaven” into the ground, say it was the worst romantic tripe to ever violate the screen or exclaim that this movie copied 1990’s “Ghost” in every conceivable way. I, however, can’t say such things in good conscience. This film is definitely tolerable.
In the beginning, Elizabeth Masterson (Reese Witherspoon) is an incredibly busy doctor at a local hospital’s emergency room. After more than 24 hours on the clock, she is forced to stop working and leaves to attend a blind date at her sister’s house; however, she doesn’t quite make it.
Mark Ruffalo plays David Abbott, a lonely landscape architect who moves into Elizabeth’s recently vacated but fully furnished apartment. David turns out to be quite the homebody. He goes out only to buy beer or when his best friend, who also happens to be his psychiatrist, begs him to. Shortly after he moves in, he is ailed with sightings of a ghost and, boy, is she angry. Her apartment is a mess, and she can’t quite figure out how a squatter had moved in without her realizing it. This is when it gets interesting.
The special effects were well done and I got the impression that Elizabeth really was a ghost. Throughout the movie, she stands in tables, walks through walls and desperately tries to grab onto phones to call for help. One inconsistency is that she can sit down in a car and be driven around, or sit down on a bench in a park but can never actually interact with anything physical that might actually provide her some assistance.
A special surprise was Jon Heder playing a psychic nerd. Most of you know him as Napoleon Dynamite, but he proved his acting skills superb once more in a slightly different role.
All in all, “Just Like Heaven” proves to be a film worth $8.50 if you’re into sappy love stories with a twist and some humor. To be honest, it is nice to see Witherspoon no longer legally blonde but, if only in part, legally dead.