With Just Like Heaven, director Mark Waters (Mean Girls) wants to have his cake and eat it to. That's not necessarily a bad thing, until you consider that the recipe used for this confection is missing a few ingredients and the final product is half-baked. And, rather than eating it, he kind of chokes on it. Just Like Heaven tries to be an unholy union of Ghost and All of Me, and the result is rarely humorous, rarely romantic, and rarely affecting. Plus, the suspension of disbelief curve is so steep that even Lance Armstrong wouldn't be able to make it to the top.
Just Like Heaven is supposed to be a ghost story, but not of the kind that are popular with horror audiences. Elizabeth Martinson (Reese Witherspoon) is a hard-working doctor who puts in 26-hour days while subsisting primarily on coffee. One rainy night, on the way home from the hospital, her car has a head-on encounter with a truck. When next we meet Elizabeth, she's a spirit haunting her old apartment, which is now occupied by David Abbott (Mark Ruffalo), a morose man who always has a beer in one hand. Eventually, David comes to realize that Elizabeth is a ghost, and Elizabeth acknowledges that she might no longer be amongst the living. The two team up to discover: (1) what happened to Elizabeth, and (2) why David is the only one who can see her.
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