The movie stars Ricky Gervais as the rude and self-obsessed dentist Dr. Pincus, Greg Kinnear as the self-obsessed and recently deceased Frank, and Tea Leoni as Frank's widow, Gwen.  The plot is about as predictable as they come.  After briefly dying during a routine colonoscopy, Dr. Pincus finds that he can see the many ghosts that are consigned to walking the streets of New York City in whatever they were wearing (or weren't wearing) when they died, hoping against hopes that their unfinished business on Earth can be wrapped up and they can be released to rest in peace.

The living can't normally see the dead, and therefore Pincus becomes very popular with the dead who are hoping to put their affairs on Earth in order to rest in peace.  Kinnear's Frank leads the pack for some mysterious reason, and he's hoping that Pincus can foil the impending wedding of his widow Gwen to a lawyer he distrusts.  Pincus has no interest in anyone - living or dead - but resigns himself to helping Frank so that he can get back to life as normal.  

You can fill in the blanks from here.  The plot is about as predictable as they come.  You've seen this story played out before with only  slight permutations, so I doubt that you'll be surprised by much here.  The movie as a whole is enjoyable, primarily on the strength of Gervais' hilarious performance.  The movie contains some unnecessary sexual innuendo, as well as some gratuitous swearing.  Neither are necessary in any way to the story, and it's a shame that once again, an otherwise clean movie has to resort to these tactics to get the slightly stronger PG-13 rating.

The movie is basically a series of redemption stories.  Pincus has the opportunity to be saved from his insensitivity and narcissism.  Frank is attempting to save Gwen from what he fears will be another bad marriage, thereby redeeming his own poor performance as a husband.  There are a gaggle of other ghosts who are after Pincus to help them put their unfinished business to rest, so they can rest.  And throughout are themes of life and death and the importance and persistence of our own actions.

The dead can't truly rest until their unfinished business is concluded.  For some, this means communicating something important to their living friends or relatives.  For at least one of the dead characters, this actually means killing off someone that he was supposed to kill off, but never managed to before his own death.  At the predictable point in the film where Pincus finally sees the light about living for others and begins to help these poor dead souls, we are treated to brief footage of how Pincus makes a huge difference in the lives of the living, while the associated dead person is released to rest in a blinding glare of light.  Not surprisingly, this montage does not include Pincus killing off the person that the dead thug needs killed in order to be released.  Yet we never see the thug again, leading the viewer to conclude that somehow, Pincus helped him as well.

So there's an afterlife that seems to be predicated on the lives we live down here, or rather, on how we wrap up our loose ends here or not.  You can lead a pretty miserable and awful life, and still find peace after death if you just fulfill your obligations or set things right with your loved ones.   The only mention made of God is in the final minutes of the movie, and only as a plea to save a life that is on the verge of death.  God apparently controls life and death, but doesn't have much else in terms of involvement either during or after life.  We are masters of our own fate.

And yet not.  It isn't enough to live your life a certain way, according to the movie.  In fact, it doesn't really matter what kind of life you live, since the end we're all headed towards seems to be pretty identical.  Even the thug who apparently was a hit man or some other type of violent killer is implied to find rest through the absence of any concrete separation of his fate from the fate of the other ghosts.  But you need to tie up your loose ends.  The killer needed Pincus to off a guy that he had promised to kill.  It was his lack of following through on his word that was keeping him tied to Earth.  So we're to assume that keeping one's word - even if the word was to kill someone else - is the difference between haunting the Earth and eternal rest?  Not very comforting, that.

AND, we discover, your loved ones have to let go of you, have to move past their grief and get on with life.  This last point is particularly fascinating in light of the book I just finished, Philippe Aries' Western Attitudes Towards Death.  Aries points out that in America and Northern Western Europe, grief is no longer socially acceptable, and this movie certainly seems to play along that theme nicely.  Get over your grief or you'll cause your dearly departed to have to linger around Earth instead of moving on to eternal peace.  No guilt there, eh?

It's a loose approximation of certain elements (or abuses/perversions of certain elements) of Roman Catholic theology in many ways.  These ghosts are whiling away their time in a not-too-unpleasant-yet-still-not-as-good-as-it-could-be afterlife.  The actions and reactions of the living have a direct effect on the eternal peace of the dead.  Everything is based in works at one level or another.  Pincus becomes the priest, where his setting things right on behalf of the ghosts sets them free in much the same way as the requisite numbers of mass for a dead person will free their soul from Purgatory to wing towards heaven.  How you actually lived your life and what you actually believed about life and death and heaven and hell and God are not really as important as doing the right things at the right time.  

Again, on a plot level the movie is completely predictable.  Tea Leoni's Gwen is a hapless woman who, despite a great deal of professional success and acumen is still easily manipulated by even the bumbling Pincus.  Frank is obsessed with stopping her upcoming marriage, yet even when we're pretty assured that Frank's reasons for that are unfounded or at least erroneously based, no real attempt is made to allow Gwen and her fiance to move on with their lives.  The narcissism that seems to plague Pincus continues in his selfish obsession with Gwen.  Pincus' own redemption and transformation is predictably cheesy and instantaneous.  Simply being challenged to 'live life for others' seems to be enough to set him right and undo all the ugliness that has adorned his life since his own loss of love.  I'll let you figure out how it ends (yes, it's that obvious).  Or, you can go rent it.  The movie really is enjoyable as a whole.  It's only when you stop to think about it a bit more that it becomes troubling in certain areas.