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Just Like Heaven
EMAILPRINTDreamWorks Distribution LLC
Mixed or average reviews
Based on 31 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 27 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Comedy | Romance
Written by:
Peter Tolan
Leslie Dixon
Marc Levy (novel If Only It Were True)
Directed by: Mark Waters
Release Date:
Theatrical: September 16, 2005
DVD: February 7, 2006
Running Time: 95 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: PG-13 for some sexual content
Starring Reese Witherspoon, Mark Ruffalo, Donal Logue, Dina Spybey, Ben Shenkman, Jon Heder, Ivana Milicevic, and Rosalind Chao
An architect believes his San Francisco apartment is inhabited by a ghost.
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Freaky Friday Head Over Heels Mean Girls The House of Yes The Spiderwick Chronicles
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
New York Post Kyle Smith
Just Like Heaven isn't far short of a classic among romantic comedies with a teary chaser, sure to please fans of "Ghost" and "Heaven Can Wait."
Read Full Review >TV Guide Angel Cohn
Works because of the utterly charming leads and a strong supporting cast.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Sheri Linden
Crossing the life-death divide, Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo are a winning pair in this smart and tender comedy.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
That Just Like Heaven succeeds at all - at least for teenage girls with limited interest in the drafting of living wills - is due entirely to Witherspoon's can-do charisma.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov
There's a manipulative streak to the proceedings, and you'd have to be stone cold dead not to grasp the inevitable outcome long before the third act, but it's a professionally handled sort of emotional manipulation common to its genre, dating back to "Blithe Spirit" and, somewhat less memorably, "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir."
Read Full Review >USA Today Mike Clark
Garnering a chuckle or two, but no more, are Donal Logue from "The Tao of Steve" (now there's a comedy) -- and, as a desperate magnet for both the slacker and "dude" demographics, Jon Heder from Napoleon Dynamite.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Connie Ogle
The film, which comes way too close to preaching, lurches away from the control of director Mark Waters (Mean Girls, Freaky Friday) and ends on a stretched-out note so sappy it makes "Must Love Dogs" look like "8 Mile."
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
Sadly, most of the fun and all the magic derive from the location. The most enthralling fantasy of Just Like Heaven is that an unemployed landscape architect and a fledgling doctor can afford a sprawling apartment with a rooftop view in San Francisco.
Read Full Review >Premiere Peter Debruge
Belongs to the same class of cotton-candy romances as "Chances Are" and "Somewhere in Time," although it steers its light-hearted subject into darker territory with the life support subplot.
Read Full Review >Empire Jo Berry
A sweet but predictable chick flick, this coasts by on the considerable charm of its two leads.
Read Full Review >Variety Brian Lowry
As uneven as the topography of its San Francisco locales, but the amiable peaks mostly offset the flat stretches and valleys. A variation on a very old meet-cute theme with a touch of otherworldly romance.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Dana Stevens
It's not heaven, exactly, but after the purgatory of the late summer movie season, it may be close enough.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
A forgettable, patched-together clone of other ghostly romances.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas
There are moments when it is possible, with effort, to forget the plot and its tired premise and enjoy Witherspoon and Ruffalo's chemistry and imagine they are in another movie. But never for long.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias
Part of the problem is Mark Ruffalo, whose tortured sensitivity in "You Can Count On Me" and "We Don't Live Here Anymore" made him seem like Marlon Brando's heir apparent, not Will Smith's.
Read Full Review >Dallas Observer Luke Y. Thompson
Unfortunately, the movie fails to fully make sense, which may be because it's based on a French novel (If Only It Were True by Marc Levy).
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader J.R. Jones
As a movie genre, the ghostly romantic comedy dates back at least as far as "Topper" (1937), and the stale premise, combined with the leads' typecasting, makes for an eminently forgettable date movie.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Ruthe Stein
The last half is so superior to the first that you wish they'd rethought the whole thing and devised a way to make it more of a one piece.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian M. E. Russell
The leads are just too good to commit fully to something this baldly formulaic. It's sad.
Read Full Review >Village Voice Joshua Land
Witherspoon's oft charming perkiness is merely patronizing here, but mid-'90s MTV staple Donal Logue steals every scene he's in as an ethically challenged therapist.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Scott Foundas
The usually zippy and subversive director Mark Waters (Freaky Friday, Mean Girls) plays things straight and suffocatingly sentimental - which actually makes the whole movie seem that much creepier.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Allison Benedikt
A huge waste of talent (Witherspoon's) and time (ours), a supernatural romantic comedy that is neither romantic, comedic, super or natural.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
The movie starts cheating the audience early, and never lets up.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jami Bernard
The problem comes when the movie turns into a tedious, faith-based diatribe against medical science.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Wesley Morris
Just Like Heaven suggests that a post-coma Elizabeth might understand what life is truly all about. Of course, if being alive means having to live in this movie, maybe she was better off the way she was.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Ann Hornaday
Outlandish, uneven, preposterous and often maddeningly morbid.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Stephen Cole
Sounds promising. What a disappointment then to report that Just Like Heaven is more like purgatory, a sweating, straining attempt to marry the wisecracking fury of the modern sitcom to the classic Rock-Doris, Cary-Kate romantic comedy.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 7.4 (out of 10) based on 27 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
[Anonymous] gave it a10:
this movie was an awsome and inspiaring lovable and laghabull movie.i really love it and i even bought it.
Mia S. gave it a9:
A truly enjoyable film. Yes, it pleases me to no end to see Reese WItherspoon comatose in her hospital bed after all the Blonde thing, or Mark Ruffalo clothed in bed after 'In The Cut', but forget chemistry, or believable sub plots or background, and chances are you'll be bawling your eyes out 90 minutes into the film. Both of them are wonderful actors and having seen all of Mark Ruffalo's films, this is probably one where he appears effortlessly hearbroken without having to crease his brow.
Malachi gave it an8:
Way more than I was expecting out of a modern-day romantic comedy. I was laughing most of the way through because everyone thought Mark Ruffalo's character was talking to himself. Definitely an interesting twist on a love story.
Larry gave it a5:
As bland as weak tea.
Mark B. gave it a7:
Not every movie ever made has to reinvent the wheel, redefine cinema as we know it, or be Citizen Kane on a stick. (And let's be honest...each and every one of us would be physically as well as intellectually exhausted if they all did!) Sometimes you just want a movie that skillfully and pleasurably replows very well-trod ground; a Cellular, or a Mr. 3000...or a Just Like Heaven. Not that there wasn't any real reason going in for me to expect it to be something more along the lines of Just Like Purgatory at best: the poster tagline 'It's a Wonderful Afterlife' rips off the title of my all-time favorite film; the success rate of supernatural romcoms is about as low as Enron's 2005 gross earnings (for every Ghost there seems to be a dozen Chances Ares, Hearts and Souls or Heavenly Kids); and quite frankly, Reese Witherspoon had pretty much worn her cutesy-princess act down to the nub. You've got to have a Babar-like memory to recall when Witherspoon was The Queen of Indie Edge; the final straw was broken last year when she torpedoed Mira Nair's Vanity Fair by playing Thackeray's unlikable, manipulative Becky Sharp as the great-grandmother of Legally Blonde's Elle Woods. But Leslie Dixon's and Peter Tolan's solid comedy writing wisely gives Witherspoon some prickly, bristly qualities not seen since Election as a ghostly being visiting her old domicile and irritating its current resident, a bereaved, semi-alcoholic couch potato played by Mark Ruffalo, until they...well, you know. (Hey, I didn't say it was original; I just said it was enjoyable.) As in 13 Going On 30, Ruffalo is your go-to guy when you want to cast an endearingly ordinary, down-to-earth shlub--in other words, someone representing 90% of your male audience--as your romantic lead, and he and Witherspoon create a lot of very funny Oscar Madison/Felix Unger vibes in the early sequences. If you wanted to make the claim that Mark Waters is the best commercial comedy director currently working in movies, I won't give you THAT much of an argument; he did possibly the best Disney comedy remake ever (Freaky Friday) and both the best SNL-vets-on-film film since, oh, let's say Tommy Boy, AND the best high school movie since the aforementioned Election with last year's Mean Girls. Waters' handling of Heaven's two scenes involving Witherspoon's sister (Dina Waters, the director's wife, who presents a rare argument in favor of casting nepotism) rather dazzlingly blends all kinds of conflicting moods including slapstick, comic misunderstandings, cute-kid humor, life-or-death suspense and much more; at his best, the man's an alchemist. But then, his expert pacing of every scene in Just Like Heaven makes it a surprisingly effective and entertaining blend of laughs, tears, drama and romance. Not that it's perfect or without flaws; the sexy neighbor subplot looks like outtakes from The 40-Year-Old Virgin that Judd Apatow wisely had removed, and the casting of Napoleon Dynamite himself, Jon Heder, as a psychic bookstore employee would've seemed slightly less opportunistic if Heder limited his use of the term "dude" to every sixth word rather than every fourth. And some viewers will find the hospital-based climax a little too disturbingly close to a certain controversial event that dominated the news earlier this year; a few social liberals may even take offense at certain plot twists. As someone who often fits into that political category myself, I can only give two responses to these folks: 1.) It's. Only. A. Movie.; and 2.) Consider it tit for tat for the conclusion of a certain actor-director's Oscar-winning film from last year that annoyed certain conservatives...and let's call it even.
Fred T. gave it a9:
Light-hearted and FUN!!! Sure, you know where the story is going but there are a couple of twists which make it a fun ride. What movie did Jami Bernard watch? Not this one.
Chad S. gave it a6:
For once, the trailer didn't reveal all of the film's secrets. When "Just Like Heaven" gets there, and you're a music fan who watched "120 Minutes" with Dave Kendall in the late-eighties, you'll smile, because the song it evokes came out the same year as The Cure classic. "Just Like Heaven" gets considerably better when the premise changes. Elizabeth(Reese Witherspoon) and David(Mark Ruffalo) become less irritating after she learns about her relationship with the world. Their bickering over who owns the apartment gets old real fast. When they open up to each other, it's not that painful to watch like your lesser romantic comedies, where the actors have little or no chemistry. A believable couple hides the contrivances of their inevitable coupling, typical of this genre. What's missing from "Just Like Heaven", however, is a romantic gesture that evokes the fatalistic whine in Robert Smith's voice.
