We Have a Ghost - Movie Review
2A Movie Review for Netflix. We Have a Ghost stars Jahi Winston, Anthony Mackie and David Harbour.
0:00 Intro
0:30 We Have a Ghost Review
4:04 Movie Rating
4:22 Outro
Directed by Christopher Landon who wrote most of the paranormal activity sequels, directed both Happy Death Day movies and has now brought us a Netflix supernatural comedy starring Jahi Winston, David Harbour, Anthony Mackie and Tig Notaro.
This film is a great quirky comedy, that has the sense of an 80’s horror comedy. In fact, with the amount of swearing peppered throughout I felt like someone has tried to emulate the PG movies of old. Seriously, they must say shit about 100 times.
Based on a short story called Ernest by Geoff Manaugh, ‘we have a ghost’ opens with the Presley family moving into a massive house that seemingly needs a lot of work, and is extremely cheap. Honestly, this house looks like it’s formed from timelord technology.
Frank, (Mackie) is struggling with work, and to maintain a relationship with his younger son Kevin (Winston) while Kevin explores the house he discovers a ghost seemingly called Ernest, played by Harbour giving an almost fully silent performance.
From the cold open of a family running from the house in the dead of night a year before the Presley’s moves in, it appears Ernest has been scaring people away since the 1970’s when he died.
Despite trying to scare Kevin, Kevin is able to record Ernest, and it gets leaked on social media. Once there all hell breaks loose, and Ernest is a star popping up on TikTok and YouTube. But with all the attention, comes the nefarious intentions from the government scientists led by Tig Notaro’s ghost hunter Dr Leslie Monroe who wants to capture Ernest and do experiments.
Most of the film is a search to find out who Ernest was, and how he died, as well as the threat of the government closing in. But this is where the film falls down a bit.
There’s too much going on, or at least the execution of all the story points don’t seem to want to fit together.
The film turns into a cat and mouse chase, along with a bit of a road movie and who dunnit, as all the story points try and converge. So now there’s too much going on, and we’re not too sure which point we need to focus on.
The strongest part for me, that had the most satisfying conclusion was the whodunnit section, which gives us the interaction between Ernest and Kevin. We discover who Ernest is and who he’s left behind. I wont spoil it here, but I would say if you want a light film that gives you some laughs watch We Have a Ghost.
Despite some negatives towards the film, I did enjoy it. The humour is there, and Harbour looks like he’s having a ball on film. With zero dialogue, he could have come across as a caricature, but with his expressions, he plays it with a grounded performance. If the government subplot had been dropped, I feel the plot would have been much tighter.
We Have a Ghost could have been a much worse film, but with some tweaks, it could have been even better.
I’m gonna give We Have a Ghost 3/5 stars making it Just a Movie.
Have you seen We Have A Ghost? Let me know what you thought about it in the comments below. Please like share, subscribe and ring that bell to be notified every time I upload a video. Thank you for watching and I’ll see you next time.