'We Have A Ghost' A Review

We Have A Ghost is a horror comedy about the Presely family who move into a beautiful but rundown Victorian in a nameless midwestern town. Kevin(Jahi Winston) the youngest befriends the resident ghost Ernest(David Harbour) and works with him to uncover the circumstances of his death while Kevin's dad Frank(Anthony Mackie) monetizes Ernest through social media.

The cast is all quite talented- with some standouts from Winston, his friend/love interest played by Isabella Russo, and a brief cameo from Jennifer Coolidge as a TV medium- but overall the script is too overstuffed with plotting and characters to give any one of them actual room to breathe and develop.

Visually slick but the sizable budget seems to have actually hamstrung writer/director Christopher Landon who, here-to-for, was on a hot streak of low budget films with Blumhouse(Freaky, Happy Death Day 1 and 2). The oversized budget seems to prevented him from exercising much needed editing. For example there a lot of expensive needle drops, which are nice, but ultimately don't serve much of a purpose. The movie is about a father-son relationship, the ghost, the government, social media. It's just too much, there's little focus and as a result it doesn't pack much of a punch. It's relatively diverting, a breezy family friendly movie but overlong, with problematic pacing, and an over abundance of narrative threads that fail to coalesce.

Low stakes, low reward.

Currently streaming on Netflix.

Stream It.