The best movies can transport you somewhere else, somewhere new and daring, adventurous, somewhere you’ve never been. But sometimes, the worst movies can do that to you as well; movies that reach into the mind and poison it, leaving you a hapless vegetable floating in a vat of spoilt perfume. This weekend’s R.I.P.D. is one of those movies. Your brain will shut off involuntarily. The world will seem far away. And the movie will contact you on another plane, in a distant voice screaming, “Quit. Just quit.” Surreally, this picture is an industry-wide call for help, an acknowledgement that sometimes $100 million really isn’t burning a hole through your pocket.
Based on an unfamiliar Dark Horse comic book (one you likely couldn’t get the target audience to read at gunpoint), this 3D monstrosity teams a hambone Jeff Bridges with a 2-kool-4-skool Ryan Reynolds in a tired cop comedy that spotlights the exploits of the Undead. In a turn of events that wouldn’t pass muster on an Ion original series, Reynolds’ dedicated cop is sent to the afterlife, plucked from “Judgment” by the Rest In Peace Department. Fond of his skills and knowing that his questionable dirty cop tactics wouldn’t assist him when called upon a Higher Power, he’s recruited into a unit that’s sent back to the streets of Boston with the face and body of character actor James Hong. He seems to have zero R.I.P.D. training, but that doesn’t stop the chief (Mary-Louise Parker, bored) from tossing him to the wolves, tasked with hunting down escaped dead criminals with the assistance of cowboy Roy (Bridges), an artifact from the 1800s.
Are there any laughs to be had from this premise? The film seems to think so, stacking wacky contrivances on top of each other to reveal a plot where the MacGuffin is a magical chunk of fake-gold that everyone must chase. Most of the jokes seem to be aimed at a demographic that wouldn’t be appropriate for this building-demolishing violence and foul language: Bridges’ corporeal form turns out to be a supermodel, one whom everyone freely checks out, but who contradicts Roy’s praising of Reynolds’ inconspicuous disguise, which he claims is “good for stakeouts.” And if these guys are secretly in the form of humans, how is it that Roy can lose his hat and grumble about it for the entire film when his female alter ego wears nothing on her head? Where did that hat go? When you discuss the hat for half of the entire film, you invite these dumb questions.
No one seems to be clear what type of film they’re making. Reynolds especially gives a joyless, angry performance, as if someone told him this were Lethal Weapon with ghosts, not Men In Black with less internal logic. He has zero chemistry with Bridges, who clowns and grumbles his way through this film as if he were paid by the overdubbed one-liner. Together they hunt down “deados” who seem to have committed the crime of, from what we can tell, refusing to go to the afterlife. This opens up all sorts of questions as to what Judgment really is, and who are the “Eternal Affairs” that the R.I.P.D. really serves, but there’s no time for that in a 90-minute movie where our heroes get to shoot the bad guys.
Quality of special effects makes no difference if you care about the characters and what’s going on. But R.I.P.D. is populated with monstrous dead people who would look out of place in a blockbuster in the ‘90s. The cartoonish look and endless, uninspired madcap energy reminds one of Son Of The Mask, that unasked-for sequel that tosses the viewer into a nightmare of cheap visuals stacked on top of each other, begging to topple over out of the frame. That picture carried the same exaggerated flop-sweat desire to please, but at least that unwatchable picture sought Tex Avery cartoons for inspiration. This one seems wedded to every beat you’ve ever seen from cop pictures, action adventure chases and films where someone attempts to communicate with a loved one through the afterlife. Somehow, the movie misses the opportunity to make a Ghost joke when Reynolds attempts to reach out to his widow through the body of the villain from Big Trouble In Little China. Of course, you can’t force what’s not there, and in moments where Reynolds and Bridges are meant to bond, it’s like watching two people who actively want to avoid talking to each other.
Even before watching it, you could tell R.I.P.D. had a definite stink to it, which is unfortunate. As much pleasure it must give people to watch a reportedly $130 million piece of garbage fail, every film deserves a fair shot. This picture was monkeyed around with through reshoots and bad buzz, and tracking never made this project look attractive, even considering how genre-friendly Universal tends to be. It’s certainly a misfire, feeling assembled from the bones of what was once a fun and marketable concept, but the hands of the studio are impossible to ignore. R.I.P.D. is so short, and contains such little interesting characterization or moments of introspection that you know that an attempt is being made to cram this into as many showtimes as possible, having cut all the moments of turgid deadweight that would slow this picture down. The movie even opens with a chase sequence that we won’t rejoin until halfway through the film, for no story-driven reason; everyone knew this thing was D.O.A. from the start.
Then again this is from Robert Schwentke, a director who clearly lacks enough of a sense of humor to embrace the absurdity of his first film Flightplan. In that picture, a woman’s daughter is kidnapped as part of an elaborate conspiracy that depends on an entire plane filled with passengers looking the other way at the same time. And in RED, the comedic aspect of Bruce Willis and his retired buddies is wasted on mean-spirited violence and preposterous CGI action sequences. Schwentke gave up on that franchise and Dean Parisot directed RED 2, which opens this weekend as well. RED 2 is not a good movie, but it is buoyed by a silly, Zucker-style sense of comedic escalation that gives the action a charming zing. One can’t help but think that same sensibility was sorely missing here.
Den of Geek Rating: Zero out of 5 Stars
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The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was better than this...........I think the LXG movie was treated to harshly.......good ol sean connery.......