? Beaten and left for dead due to a series of misunderstandings, teenaged Nick finds himself able to leave his own body, but with no one able to see him the only hope of the truth coming out lies with the female gang leader who delivered the deadly blow.
+ Despite the trappings of a teen crime drama, the appeal is really the fantasy of getting to watch the aftermath of your own death. So Nick learns that his mom (Marcia Gay Harden) really wasn’t so bad, and, surprisingly, neither was the thieving thug who almost killed him. (I expect they made the thug a girl because it would be easier to make her sympathetic later on.) The emphasis is on the two teens (who are both fatherless) coming to grips with their own lives as much as on the plot, since, unlike them, we already know what happened.
- What do Hollywood executives do when there’s no more sequels and adaptations of old TV shows and comic books to make? Why, they scan the globe for foreign-language hits they can make shitty English-language versions of. I didn’t see this in its 2002 Swedish incarnation, so can’t really say if the movie as a whole is worse, but I can say they’ve gone and given it a crap American-style ending that, even considering the premise, is dumb. And so is the Ghost-style scene where Nick is able to channel his voice through the living.
= **1/2 This won’t win you over if you think the whole idea of the story is dopey, but it’s not a typical teen movie and was better than I might have expected.
IMDB link
reviewed 5/3/07
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