Ghost bad
It’s not exactly news that watching a Bill Cosby movie in 2025 is an uneasy proposition. But even setting aside the baggage of spending an hour and a half hanging out with a serial rapist who built his image as a wholesome family man — which, to be clear, you shouldn’t — Ghost Dad isn’t just a tedious watch; it’s a miserable one. It fails in ways that transcend Cosby’s wrecked reputation, offering an exasperating, clumsy, incoherent mess of a film.
Released in 1990 when Cosby was one of the most famous people on the planet, Ghost Dad was one of a couple of panned attempts to bottle The Cosby Show magic for the big screen. Hollywood salivated for a crossover hit to make Cosby a movie star on par with Tom Hanks or Eddie Murphy. Instead, they got a pair of massive duds — Leonard Part 6 and Ghost Dad.
The plot is exactly as high-concept as the title suggests: Cosby plays Elliot Hopper, a widower and workaholic who, after a taxi accident involving a Satanist cabbie (Raynor Scheine), becomes a ghost. Meanwhile, he’s scrambling to close a big work deal and set up life insurance to protect his family before “crossing over” to the other side on a deadline — Thursday, close of business. (Because even the afterlife respects corporate deliverables and business hours, apparently.) Hijinks, such as they are, ensue.
The real star of Ghost Dad is the baffling and extensive list of rules for ghosts operating in our earthly plane. Let’s run down the basics: (1) Elliot can walk through walls, and sometimes fall through floors, but also can hold physical objects. (2) He can’t be seen in light, so he always needs to hide behind shades and in shadows if he wants to be visible. (Invisible Dad would honestly have been just as accurate a title.) (3) He can transport himself through the telephone to give his daughter’s obnoxious boyfriend a whack. (4) He can’t talk, but he CAN project his voice into people’s brains so they think he can talk, meaning this “rule” is only relevant for about one third of one scene. (5) If you start flickering, it means you might be on the verge of leaving Earth and entering the afterlife (why this happens even though we’ve already established a concrete time for occurring is left unexplained). (6) If you find your physical body (i.e. corpse), and it still has some life in it, you can actually actually re-enter it and resuscitate it like Meg at the end of Hercules. This last rule is especially head-scratching because it calls into question whether Elliot is even a “ghost.”
Even setting aside the post-1990 revelations, Cosby’s Elliot is not exactly endearing as a dad. He’s impatient, snappish, and utterly lacking empathy with his kids. Meanwhile, the script — which should have been breezy, given its elevator pitch — gets mired in weirdly dodgy side quests, most of which have very little to do with the ghostly aspects of Elliot. It genuinely feels like the set of writers pulled out their notebooks for scenarios they’d deemed not quite funny enough for a network TV sitcom. It’s shockingly messy for something that should have been a softball; I mean, if you can’t come up with ten ideas for situations based simply on the title of “Ghost Dad,” you’re doing something wrong.
Cosby’s acting, as it were, consists of a nice, putrid blend of mugging, grimacing, and flailing as each situation requires. I mean, I’m not exactly expecting a nuanced turn given the film’s timbre, but he’s still an annoying presence. Cosby’s best tone, from The Cosby Show that I’ve seen, is exasperation at idiocy. But in Ghost Dad, he’s the idiot, so I didn’t really find much charm in anything he did.
The film’s tone is just cataclysmically miscalibrated. It’s levied with the breezy air of a prime time TV show with a laugh track, even when the kids are reckoning with their father’s death. There’s a strong dash of sexual innuendos and horniness (one of Elliot’s biggest mishaps is hooking up with his girlfriend because she accuses him of having erectile dysfunction). Perhaps if the film had opened with the father already a ghost rather than the dad’s slapstick death in a horrible car crash, it could have clicked, but any notion of grief is completely discarded. If these kids aren’t sad that their dad died, why should I be?
The film is directed by the great Sidney Poitier, Mr. Tibbs himself. Poitier is an on-screen legend, but never built a strong reputation as a director. By far the most interesting part of Ghost Dad is the undercurrents — and left completely under the surface — of a Black man trying to make it in a fast-paced white person’s world. All of Elliot’s colleagues are white, and the extra pressure this puts on Elliot to thrive in corporate America against the odds, making a comfortable life for his family as a single dad, might actually be poignant if the rest of the film wasn’t a steaming turd.
I also confess to feeling just a flicker of affection for the film because it is a live action, practical effects, family-oriented comedy. It’s a dead breed of film. Anything with a similar target audience and tone these days would be rendered in CGI and released by Illumination or the skeleton of DreamWorks. But some of these effects are cool, or at least charming in a silly way: Cosby floating through ceilings; cars passing through him; the character appearing and reappearing as the lights turn on and off, etc. It’s mostly green screen 101, but professionally and cleanly executed. (The overall cinematography is dull as a rock, though — mostly brownish-grayish medium shots and close-ups.)
Any goodwill earned by a handful of practical gags and suppressed ideas about being a Black family in middle class America evaporates long before the credits roll. And with Cosby at the helm, you won’t be dying to give it the benefit of the doubt, anyway. Even with the lunacy of the increasingly labyrinthine ghost protocols, Ghost Dad is mostly bad in a dull way rather than a loopy one. Whether you’re watching it out of morbid curiosity or nostalgia for the early ‘90s, the only sensible course of action is to turn on the lights and hope it disappears.
Is It Good?
Not Good (2/8)
Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.