Ricky Gervais effortlessly makes his leading role debut in a spirited rom-com that leaves the opposition for dead.

Those eagerly awaiting the chance to gloat over Ricky Gervais’s inevitable fall from grace are going to have to hold fire just a little bit longer.

After the global successes of The Office and Extras, Britain’s top comedy export convincingly demonstrates that he’s able to step up from cameo roles to carrying the whole caboodle.

He plays the misanthropic Dr Bertram Pincus, a cynically snobbish English dentist working in New York where he treats everyone with disdain verging on malice.

Admitted into hospital for a routine colonoscopy, he unwittingly dies for seven minutes (thanks to a flaky anaesthetist labouring under the hospital’s “three strikes and out” policy) before being resuscitated.  

Discharged with a clean bill of health, he discovers he’s the object of attention from a strange, ever-growing group of followers – a sort of ghostly Village People. It turns out, like an older, grumpier, tubbier Haley Joel Osment of Sixth Sense fame, “he can see dead people.”

Most bothersome among these is Frank (Kinnear), who was flattened by a bus and wants Bertram to break up the approaching re-marriage of his widow Gwen (Leoni) to a “scumbag lawyer.”

Director and co-writer David Koepp’s intricately-written script appears tailor-made for Gervais’s “comedy of embarrassing manners” and it’s elevated a couple of notches by sublimely sympathetic playing from Leoni and Kinnear.

There’s a winning strain of political incorrectness and gentle parody running through the dialogue. In the course of one conversation, Bertram observes “everyone is equal – apart from the Chinese” and “I like Sting because you can tell he’s educated because of his lyrics.”

Gervais masterfully gauges Bertram’s transformation from people-hating curmudgeon to a close approximation of a human being even if his redemption process may prove a little sweet-toothed for some tastes.

Ultimately, it achieves that seemingly impossible task – a rom-com where the rom is sweet and poignant and the com is  sophisticated and witty.

Have the good (Sixth) sense to see it.

Tim Evans