Ghostmates

Smosh's second feature film, "Ghostmates," is so unbelievably incompetent that I don't know where to begin.

It's a movie starring YouTube comedians Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla, known for their channel Smosh, as Eddie and Charlie. On the day he wants to ask his girlfriend Jessica (Francesca Galassi) to move in with him, he inadvertently chokes himself to death on his necktie when it gets caught in the door. But instead of going to heaven, Eddie is doomed to haunt the apartment until he can make things right on Earth and put himself at peace.

Enter Charlie, an unemployed cartoonist and electronics salesman who's been out of work for six months, yet somehow has money to shell out for a new home. He moves into the dead Eddie's suite, and Eddie twists his arm into helping him set things right so he can ascend to heaven. All of this is in spite of Eddie having the ability to interact with the world, like using a ketchup bottle to write on the wall or being able to enter people's bodies to possess them, and with a skill set like that, it's anyone's guess why Eddie needs Charlie to help him at all.

Even with a premise as worn and as overused as this one, the Smosh team still manages to make a mess of it. They don't add anything new, exciting, or surprising to a very predictable story, but that's not even the worst part of it. Even the easiest things they manage to muck up. There's no consistency for how Eddie the Ghost behaves, for example. He's able to walk through walls and inhabit people's bodies, but when his ex-girlfriend tries to touch his hand, hers doesn't phase through his. Eddie is also only able to lift up objects, it seems, when the plot demands it, because there are numerous circumstances when conflict could have been resolved if Eddie had just picked something up to prove he's actually a ghost.

On a technical level, the direction is lazy, the sound mix is abysmal, and the cinematography is that of a YouTube video with no effort being made to make it appear cinematic. Shadows on people's faces at nighttime? Really? For being produced by YouTube Red, this is a film that shows very little production value.

Its pacing is also abhorrent, and we don't even meet Padilla's character until we're almost at the 10-minute mark. Eddie doesn't even have a goal until 20 minutes into the movie. The middle is paced just fine, but there aren't any stakes for our awkward goofball leads, and the ending third is just speedy and weightless.

Yet the film's main folly is that its target audience is one that doesn't even know what the word "folly" means. Plot points are repeated over and over again, messages are hammered into the viewer like a brick to the face, and all of the comedy completely lacks both humor and subtlety. The "jokes" screenwriter Ryan Finnerty and stars Hecox and Padilla have devised for this film are uncannily bereft of any punchlines. And when there are comedic situations in the film, they exist only for a joke and not to serve the story. Why is T. Pain in this film? Because someone thought it'd be funny. Why is there a conversation about corn dogs that goes on for a full minute and serves no purpose to the plot? Because someone thought it'd be funny. Why does the story grind to a halt for an out-of-nowhere and probably offensive Bollywood spoof? Because someone thought it'd be funny.

That the film's jokes are aimed at such a young demographic that its audience wouldn't even care about the lack of punchlines would be forgivable if not for how seriously the film takes itself.

The things that people love about Smosh, based on their Food Fight videos alone, is their unabashed goofiness, their absurdist sense of humor, and their fast-paced, zany action. "Ghostmates" has none of this. It's taking two comedians known for their silliness and placing them in a grounded, dramatic piece that puts a dull story before the comedy, and I'm sure that's something that no one -- not even Smosh fans -- wants to see.