Jack Handy, eat your heart out.
And ''The Five People You Meet in Heaven" disperses its hooey for three hours. Three hours that you can never get back. Ever. There's a remarkable amount of dead air pretending to be sensitive pacing in the narrative, dead air that by all rights belongs to the sadly preempted ''Desperate Housewives." Imagine close-ups of noble characters staring, thinking, looking holy; water shimmering oh-so-poetically; clouds, puffy clouds. Imagine an extended war sequence that could put you to sleep, despite its explosions and gunfire, not to mention the presence of Michael Imperioli from ''The Sopranos."
The stretched-thin story line revolves around an 83-year-old amusement park handyman named Eddie (Jon Voight), who dies trying to save a little girl from a faulty park ride. Eddie goes to heaven, where he revisits pivotal chapters of his biography -- the war, his marriage, his parents -- with the help of a guiding spirit from each chapter. It's like Scrooge's overnight journey through his life, except Eddie, the Scrooge figure, is a already a nice guy who just needs a dose of Sunday school to become even nicer. Think of lemonade, then think of adding saccharine.
''The Five People You Meet in Heaven" will undoubtedly attract a large audience, partly because it's based on a bestseller and partly because it promises a good old-fashioned holiday dose of earnest inspiration. But I'm guessing even the most eager viewers will drop out as the movie drags on, as the obviousness and artificiality become unbearable, as Albom's script gives them cavities.
Even the makeup, costuming, and scenery are hokey in this would-be fable. The characters from Eddie's past dress in the kind of stereotypically nostalgic outfits generally seen in a high school pageant. And the backdrops often look just as amateur. The production certainly must have cost plenty of money, but it ends up looking as cardboard as its flat characters, all of whom are now resting quietly in their dormitory at central casting.
