Ghostly Witherspoon can't save the ghastly 'Heaven''Just Like Heaven' is just awful

Romance isn't alive but on life support in Just Like Heaven, a groaningly awful romantic comedy starring Reese Witherspoon as an apparition haunting a San Francisco apartment rented by a recently widowed landscape architect.

In the tortured arithmetic of Mark Waters' tasteless film, ghost grief = true love.

The ghost is Elizabeth (Witherspoon), a medical resident working 26-hour shifts in ER. While she's speeding to a blind date, an 18-wheeler plows into her car.

Given the nature of the collision, we assume she has died, and that's why her apartment is up for rent and David (Mark Ruffalo) is the new occupant.

Before neatnik Elizabeth can say boo! she is ragging her slob tenant about his beer bottles leaving rings on her gleaming wood tables. Soon after this Odd Couple foreplay, David, still pining for his late wife, finds himself in love with yet another woman he can't touch. And he seems to be the only person who can see Elizabeth.

Directed by Mark Waters (Freaky Friday, Mean Girls), Heaven is an unpalatable mish-mash of the meet-cute and the metaphysical.

The only factors that make the film at all endurable are Witherspoon, who in the early hospital scenes establishes a crackling comic rhythm, and Jon Heder (the actor who played Napoleon Dynamite), as the proprietor of an occult bookstore who can see things that only cats and mystics can.

Perhaps he's seeing a better movie than we are.

Contact movie critic Carrie Rickey

at 215-854-5402 or crickey@phillynews.com.

Read her recent work at http://go.philly.com/carrierickey.

Just Like Heaven

* 1/2 (out of four stars)

Produced by Laurie MacDonald and Walter F. Parkes, directed by Mark Waters, written by Peter Tolan and Leslie Dixon, based on "If Only It Were True" by Marc Levy, photography by Daryn Okada, music by Rolfe Kent, distributed by DreamWorks.

Running time: 1 hour, 35 mins.

Elizabeth. . . Reese Witherspoon

David. . . Mark Ruffalo

Jack. . . Donal Logue

Darryl. . . Jon Heder

Parent's guide: PG-13 (sexual content)

Playing at: area theaters