We Have a Ghost (2023)

PG-13 for language, a funny scene with mild gore effects, and implications of potential sexuality without actually doing anything all that scandalous.  Probably the gore scene is the one that might push this movie into PG-13.  Yeah, I guess the language is pretty constant throughout, but it all feels mild.  Oh, there's also a murder (again, a ghost is part of the title) and a bunch of attempted murder.  Still, it feels pretty tame.  PG-13 makes sense, but you could probably watch this with a younger audience.

DIRECTOR: Christopher Landon

See?  I told you I would watch this one!  It just took me a minute to get to it.  Okay, I watched this at the request of one of my former students.  We're having an alumni get together to watch Psycho and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, assuming that I can stay awake that long.  (Realistically, I can only handle one movie because I'm an old man with a family. Anyway, We Have a Ghost is definitely one of the movies of all time.  Let me back up.

I was warned that this movie wasn't amazing.  There was complete disclosure that this student just really enjoyed this movie, despite the fact that it wasn't necessarily anything special.  I, for some reason, really hoped that I would be moved by something with that description.  After all, I'm the guy who rallied behind Flamin' Hot this year because it was a movie that caught me off guard.  We Have a Ghost didn't do much for me.  While I kind of enjoyed it for the first half of the movie, I was almost a little annoyed by the movie at the end.  It's not like the movie really creates any cinematic crimes, per se.  It's just that it's a movie that keeps escalating instead of turning inwards.  That's not a problem because it's not like the movie does what it does by accident.  Christopher Landon is starting to earn a little bit of a reputation behind his specific subgenre of horror movies.  (It's really weird to call We Have a Ghost a horror movie, by the way.  This is closer to Casper the Friendly Ghost than it is to Poltergeist.) While it seems like Landon does like horror and scares, he's far more interested in turning a genre on its ear a bit.  He likes to laugh at tried-and-true formulae and I kind of appreciate him for it.  But We Have a Ghost really gets its premise out of the way fast and never really looks back.

Fundamentally, this takes the notion that it is absurd that people find ghosts scary.  Don't get me wrong.  Often, I find a good ghost story or a haunting story the most frightening of the stories, despite the fact that I don't believe in ghosts even a little bit. But Landon's kind of right.  If we tend to follow lore and other ghost stories as canon, most ghosts are victims of horrible circumstance.  Why would they be scary?  Everything about the ghost narrative says that ghosts, when they complete their unfinished business, can move onto another plane of existence.  Ideally, this would be some kind of afterlife.   Cool.  But ghosts in all of these stories are killers.  What kind of closure are they looking for?  In the case of Ernest / Randy (whom I will be referring to as Ernest because he's called that for the majority of the movie), he's just a dude who got the short end of the stick and never got to see his daughter again.  That's technically the stuff of ghost stories.  It's just that a guy who got killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time shouldn't be scary.  He should just be...a dude.

The odd thing was that, as much as the movie wanted me to bond with Ernest, I didn't.  I don't know why.  Maybe because I found Kevin far more interesting.  I can't explain it.  There's a movie about a guy being murdered and the fame that comes with being a ghost and I was interested in the kid who had no friends. (AM I THE KID WHO HAS NO FRIENDS?)  Part of it comes from the idea that Ernest can't talk and can't remember anything, so Kevin becomes a far better avatar for the audience.  Now, there's something I'm going to explore here that is both a compliment and a complaint, so bear with me.  Kevin's story is interesting.  Kevin has a lot of baggage with his character.  He's a kid who absolutely adores his father and can't stand him.  Kevin starts the film with a chip on his shoulder.  I think we've all been programmed to love Anthony Mackie.  There's a reason that he's the current Captain America.  He's just likable.  (Although I'm going to be really bummed when everyone says that he's not their Cap, mirroring the racism that the comic book predictred a decade ago.)  But then we find out that Anthony Mackie as Dad is a bad man.  The problem is...we are often told that he's a bad man and he's not often shown as a bad man.  

This B-plot is handled quite poorly. The movie is really afraid for us to hate Dad in this movie. We see him do awful things, but he does them in a charming way.  Mackie does a really good job of having his character believe that he's doing the right thing, despite the fact that he's hurting everyone around him.  Part of that comes down to how the rest of the family reacts to Dad's choices to exploit Ernest for personal gain.  Kevin's the only one who is really mad about it.  Mom is slightly annoyed at times, but can't deny the financial gains that have been coming to the family.  So when the government (this movie really escalates, guys) decides to capture Ernest, Dad feels bad but no one really hates him by this point.  It's just because Anthony Mackie is so darned charming.The movie just has a bit too much wholesomeness.  It wants to give us conflict between father and son, but not so much that we can't forgive Dad by the end.  What?  You want me to argue that this movie is too wholesome?

The movie's climax involves the real Ernest, who killed Ghost Ernest years ago, confront Kevin and his family.  It seems like Real Ernest got away with it (You know what I mean, Vern?) That guy takes Kevin hostage with a gun to his head.  (My moment of applause showing that the true threat to humanity is an old white man with a gun.  We may continue.) Kevin elbows him, gets away.  Dad tackles Real Ernest.   But somehow, old White guy beats up (let me check) Anthony Mackie and leaves him incapacitated.  Kevin gets away, but older brother Fulton also gets taken down by this septegenarian.  A reminder: Ernest is holding a gun that he intended to use to kill this family because he thought that they knew his secret and that he might go to prison.  Fulton is left unshot, as is Dad.  What kind of killer is this?  He keeps beating the people he's trying to kill and not killing them.  I'm not saying that the Presley family should be killed.  I want them to live. Again, I'm preaching the fact that Kevin is a likable character.  But it's weird that he's not shooting all of them considering that he's holding a gun and they can't fight back.  Do you know why?

This movie is too wholesome.

But the movie isn't a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination.  It's just...silly.  Ghost Ernest, for a guy who can't talk, is charismatic.  The fact that America falls in love with Ernest is a little funny and also understandable.  While the movie doesn't have a political message (shy of a BLM poster out of focus in one shot), it does kind of take down American obsession with social media.  Sometimes, people are all about Ernest.  Sometimes, they're really scared by him.  

The silliness, as fun as the movie is, does hold the movie back.  I wanted to love Tig Notaro's character. The whole government thing is an ingredient too far.  We just finished season three of The Bear and that entire ingredient needs to go.  Simplify.  There's too much stuff on that plate.  Ultimately, the government stuff didn't go anywhere.  There's an implication that Real Ernest had a tentative relationship with the government, but that didn't make a ton of sense and seemed odd that they kept nodding the eagle connection. (My takeaway was that Real Ernest didn't actually have anything to do with the government and that he just used the bust of an eagle to clobber Ghost Ernest over the head.)   The movie kind of added the whole government plot to give the movie an action sequence and a car chase.  Also, what was Kevin being arrested for?  It seemed weird that Ernest getting next to a girl was enough for a warrant.  The whole government thing?  Remove this from the movie.

Anyway, it's fine.  I'm on a long string of "It's fine" movies.  When you watch a lot of movies and you basically like everything, there's a lot of movies that you write "It's fine" about.  I wanted to love it more, but there's just a lot of things that are done for silliness reasons.  I'm probably going to watch a Bergman movie next, so we'll see how much I needed just a little silliness in my life.