Dan Stevens, Leslie Mann and Isla Fisher mug spiritedly but there is little life in this unfunny Noël Coward adaptation
The classic Noël Coward
comedy about a ghost (first filmed by David Lean in 1945 with Rex Harrison) has now been adapted again, with stage and TV director Edward Hall making his movie debut. It can only be described as an un-reinvention, a tired, dated and unfunny period piece that changes the original plot a bit but offers no new perspective, and no new reason to be doing it in the first place. (Not compared with, say, Matthew Warchus’s stage revival of Coward’s Present Laughter at the Old Vic, with Andrew Scott radically reinventing the leading role.) This film looks unironically like the tatty old musical revue show that Ken Russell imagined for his “meta” adaptation of The Boy Friend.