The Great Ghost Rescue

THE GREAT GHOST RESCUE is a pitifully poor British children's fantasy film that mars a long and great tradition. Ghosts have long been a standby of British children's entertainment, with stuff like MOONDIAL and THE GHOST OF GREVILLE LODGE getting up to all kinds of effective spooky shenanigans. Whereas this recent film merely copies the Hollywood look and style without having character of its own. It doesn't even feel British.

The storyline is about a group of ghosts who are evicted from their stately home and focused to go wandering the country, seeking refuge. A squad of ghostbusters are hot on their tail. This is merely a CGI fuelled adventure which obviously riffs on the likes of HARRY POTTER and copies the style of the ghosts from those films. The addition of a bad CGI belching skull is probably the nadir of the movie. It would seem to me that the target audience of this film is roughly five years of age.

Indeed, below-average CGI appears to be the order of the day in this film, because otherwise the jokes are very weak and the plot non-existent. I felt particularly sorry for Kevin McKidd, having seen him waste his considerable talents in the likes of this and PERCY JACKSON; anyone who's seen ROME will know he's capable of much, much more. Otherwise, THE GREAT GHOST RESCUE is saddled with an insufferable child lead, cameos from familiar faces, and a whole lot of seen-it-all-before tiredness going on.