STARRING: Ricky Gervais, Tea Leoni, Greg Kinnear

As Bertram Pincus, an embittered dentist whose seven-minute death under general anaesthesia results in an inconvenient ability to see ghosts, Ricky Gervais's resolutely ordinary face (round), ordinary figure (lumpy) and ordinary past (dumped by his girlfriend) transcend this occasionally ordinary movie to prove that yes, it can.

When New York's population of ghosts, overjoyed that a living person can see them, ask him to help them right wrongs for their loved ones, Pincus ungraciously gives in to the most persistent, Frank (Greg Kinnear). Frank wants him to prevent his wife Gwen (Tea Leoni), who lives in his building, from marrying again.

Thankfully, director David Koepp allows Gervais to do his own, peculiarly British, thing, much to the movie's benefit. Despite the script's heavy-handed signalling of his character (he steals a cab from a baggage-laden lone woman! Everything in his apartment is freakishly neat! He's always rude to his doorman!) he imbues his two-dimensional grump-turned-good role with a real, breathing, and, yes, ordinary humanity. That the ordinary is a theme of the movie is made clear when Gwen insists to Pincus that his mundane story of heartbreak is important; that we all, however ordinary, matter.

It's hard to think of an actor who could have played this better than Gervais, with his unparalleled ability to convey squirm-inducing embarrassment, and in contrast Leoni's role - and much of the rest of the film - appears underwritten. However, in a genre dominated by unlikely plot twists and blandly beautiful stars, it's great to see a bit of reality shoulder its way into the picture. And Gervais is relentlessly, inescapably real, his deadpan delivery never coming off as scripted or rehearsed.

A romcom with a dose of reality, Ghost Town is sweet but never sickly, a welcome ode to the joys of the humdrum.