Four different people are seen at the beginning of the story doing different things. There is Harrison, an aspiring singer, who gets paralyzed during his audition and walks out of the theater. We find Julia at the Purple Onion where her beau has come to propose, but she can't make up her mind and he leaves. Nurse Penny Washington is preparing to go to her midnight shift, not before putting her three children to bed. And finally, the punk Milo Peck is up to no good.
The next thing we see is how these four board a bus whose driver, Hal, is preoccupied with a car moving alongside, where a couple is pawing one another. That the bus crashes, doesn't surprise us, since all is pointing out to an accident. The four people and the driver are seen floating toward heaven.
At that precise moment, a couple is rushing to a hospital where the wife is going to deliver her baby, but they have no chance, the boy is born in the car and the four souls we saw floating before, return as it appears they are going to stay with this boy as his guardian angels. Julia, Harrison, Milo and Penny, are there for the duration, or at least that seems to be their purpose.
The film changes to a grown up Thomas Reilly. He is in a strange relationship with the lovely Anne, a girl who can't figure Thomas out. The foursome, take turns in changing this young man's mind as they work on him to take charge of his life and get to be somebody. Each ghost can make him do things when they enter his soul. Unfortunately, Hal, the driver, has another idea in mind: he comes to collect the quartet one at a time to take them to bigger and better things.
Ron Underwood, the director, working on the material George Hansen wrote, follows Hollywood's formula for "after life" movies. This film evokes other pictures of the genre, mainly, "Ghost", "Field of Dreams", "Heaven can Wait", and others that tackled the idea of what happens when mortals die. The film, as shown by comments in this forum, seems to be a favorite for a lot of fans that find the mere idea of the after life appealing.
What Mr. Underwood got was a good ensemble for his quartet of angels: Kyra Sedgwick, Alfre Woodard, Charles Grodin and an excellent appearance by Tom Sizemore, an actor not seen often playing comedy. The wonderful Robert Downey Jr. appears as the grown up Thomas Reilly and does a wonderful job with the role. Elizabeth Shue plays his girlfriend, and David Paymer is seen as Hal, the distracted bus driver responsible for the tragedy that results as the basis of this comedy.
The film is light and it will delight fans of the genre.
