Pay the Ghost feels like an Insidious knockoff. Granted, Insidious was the first movie to use certain elements, but this movie seems to really function as an attempt to recreate what makes that film franchise so successful. It is a story of a parent who must head into a strange supernatural world in order to rescue his son from a malevolent force. But it is done with much less skill, its script bumbling through a mystery that it doesn’t know how to solve.
A year ago, on Halloween, Mike (Nicolas Cage) lost his seven-year-old son Charlie (Jack Fulton) at a street fair under mysterious circumstances. The loss has caused him to become estranged with his wife Kristen (Sarah Wayne Callies), and he's spent the whole year obsessed with finding his son. Now, it is three days before Halloween, and Mike believes that his son is trying to reach out to him. He and his wife start encountering strange things that indicate that their son is alive, and is asking them to save him. His son's messages lead him to discover a dark chapter of New York's history, and a strange connection to ancient beliefs.
The thing about this film is that the main characters never actually figure anything out. There isn't any real rhyme or reason to the progression of the investigation. Mike basically stumbles on to every next step, guided by some supernatural contrivance. At one point in the film, everything is just explained to Mike and Kristen in one fell swoop, thanks to a chatty one-scene character that just happens to know everything that they need to know. This is a textbook example of bad writing, the script stopping the entire movie in order to deliver a truckload of tedious exposition.
The film taps into a pretty unique mythology, but it isn't able to make much of it. It basically ends up becoming a low-rent version of Insidious, the film throwing away any unique elements it might have as it pursues overly familiar modern horror tropes. And it isn't even scary. At best, the film delivers a couple of big jump scares, but it never really generates an atmosphere of danger. The main threat is weirdly inactive through most of the film, despite displaying enough power to thwart the heroes at any given time.
And when it finally comes to confront the main threat, Mike is just as useless. Mike ends up achieving his goals without actually having done anything himself, all of his progress through this story provided by external forces. He never really knows what it is he’s supposed to be doing, and ends up getting into dangerous situations without any plan whatsoever. Granted, if you want a hapless hero, you can't do much better than Nicolas Cage. Cage is usually at his most entertaining when it feels like his character doesn’t really know what’s going on. He tends to commit to the mania, and ends up making things more enjoyable than they really ought to be. His appeal only goes so far, however. This movie just isn’t worth it.
Pay the Ghost takes a lazy approach to mystery. It doesn’t really lay out clues, or set up a big reversal. It just has its characters vaguely aware that there is something more going on, before having all the answers explained to them in one big lump just before the third act. There really isn’t much here. This is one of those totally disposable films that only seem to exist because Nicolas Cage needs work. It’s really hard to remember sometimes that Cage has won an Academy Award. Films like this don’t help.
My Rating:
