“Just Like Heaven” should easy to like. After all, it stars Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo, both of whom are pretty likeable and easy on the eyes. It also co-stars John “Napoleon Dynamite” Heder as a dorky psychic and Donal Logue as a dorky psychiatrist, and they’re both pretty friendly guys, even though they’re not as attractive as the film’s stars. It should be a pleasant way to waste 90 minutes, but “Just Like Heaven” is also a romantic comedy, a genre that, as a whole, is monumentally difficult to even tolerate, much less enjoy. “Just Like Heaven” is hampered not only by its own genre, but also by an unintentional political statement buried in a lame plot twist, one that makes it hard to watch without cringing.

Witherspoon stars as Elizabeth Masterson, an eternally perky doctor hopelessly devoted to her job. She works 26-hour shifts, running on nothing but love for her patients and about 30 cups of coffee. But her love of work leaves her without a love life, a condition that her sister Abby tries to remedy by setting up Elizabeth on a blind date. But Abby’s efforts, and Elizabeth’s life, are cut short when a tractor-trailer crashes into Elizabeth’s car as she makes her way to the date. Three months later, David (Ruffalo), a lonely landscape architect reeling from the death of his wife, takes over the lease of Elizabeth’s spacious—and very clean—apartment. He gets the comfortable couch and swank coffee table she left behind, as well as her displaced spirit. David, who’s spent the last few months in beer-soaked haze, doesn’t know he’s seeing a ghost, a problem compounded by the fact that Elizabeth doesn’t know she’s dead. What follows is pretty routine—she scolds him for his excessive drinking and slovenliness, he calls her annoying and tries to have her exorcised from the apartment. Of course, through it all, they fall in love.

Except, contrary to all movie logic, Elizabeth isn’t dead. In a twist that smacks of a kind of wish fulfillment for the Religious Right, Elizabeth is actually in a coma, chilling out on life support in her former workplace. By the time David and Elizabeth discover her corporeal form, sister Abby is ready to pull the plug, saying that Elizabeth would have never wanted to prolong her life artificially. At this point, it’s impossible not to think about Terri Schiavo and the political fiasco that characterized the end of her life six months ago. Even though it’s unlikely that’s what the crew behind “Just Like Heaven” was going for—it’s based on a novel released in 2000—the whole movie is kind of soured once that realization hits. When you should be laughing at David and Elizabeth’s cute bickering, you’re instead thinking about feeding tubes and Sen. Bill Frist’s armchair diagnoses.

David then makes it his mission to keep Elizabeth alive. It’s not long before the film’s third act spirals out of control into a slapstick caper during which David and his psychiatrist pal attempt to steal Elizabeth’s body from the hospital.

By the time we find out about Elizabeth’s coma, “Just Like Heaven” is utterly ridiculous, even by romantic comedy standards. Once the whole body-stealing bit kicks into gear, it’s unintentionally hilarious. Despite this, it’s surprisingly okay—“Just Like Heaven” isn’t nearly as offensive as “Must Love Dogs,” the last atrocious rom-com to haunt theaters, and there are a few funny parts. Ruffalo does some excellent physical comedy during the film, particularly when his ghostly girlfriend momentarily posses him. Heder gets a few clever lines, but isn’t much more than a Napoleon Dynamite-lite. For her part, Witherspoon is watchable, even though the character is, at best, a one-note stereotype. It’s not a heavenly film by any means, but once you get the whole Terri Schiavo thing out of your head, it’s an easy movie to both laugh with and laugh at.