Over Your Dead Body

The miracle everyone pulls off is making a poisonous relationship dryly hilarious, even if every civilized exchange eventually becomes a figurative frying pan flying through the air.

Over Your Dead Body pulls off the magic trick of bringing exploitation cinema into a timeline that's a walking parody of itself, delivering one of the bloodiest and most entertaining films of the year.

A tale of miserable spouses plotting each other’s demise, it doesn’t always work, but its action comedy stylings are enough to keep it entertaining even when it swerves into ugly excess or extraneous subplots.

Despite Segel and Weaver’s best efforts, they can’t make this bickering duo deliciously awful, the characters proving more grating than hilariously combustible.

Once it turns into a home-invasion thriller, the film becomes more sadistic than hilarious.

Ultimately, Over Your Dead Body is too messy for its own good. It is unable to settle into any one choice. The repeated motif of flashbacks and plot twists is fun, but not always useful in keeping the ball up.

Taccone can’t find the right mix of comedy and horror in “Over Your Dead Body,” which is a faithful — perhaps too faithful — remake of a 2021 Norwegian film, “The Trip.”

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Go Buckeyes. Entertaining black comedy with a lot more action and blood than I expected.

Over Your Dead Body should have been exactly my kind of messy fun: a dark action comedy about a married couple who no longer love each other and secretly plan to kill one another. The setup is simple, mean, absurd and full of potential. The problem is that the film keeps escalating, but rarely becomes genuinely funny. There is a lot happening here. People appear, plans fall apart, violence gets bigger, situations become more ridiculous, and scene after scene tries to push the absurdity further. On paper, that sounds like a good black comedy. In practice, I often felt like I was watching cinematic doomscrolling. Something was always happening, but almost nothing really interested me. The biggest issue is the central relationship. Dan and Lisa are supposed to feel like a couple exhausted by each other, two people who have reached such a toxic dead end that murder somehow becomes the next logical step. But I never felt that history, chemistry or believable resentment between them. Even their hatred feels artificial. It does not feel like two adults trapped in a dead marriage. It feels more like two children trying to get rid of friends who touched their toys. Jason Segel is easily the person I enjoyed watching the most, though I admit that may partly be because I simply like him as an actor. His face, body language and comic timing usually work for me. He has that physical comedy quality where he can make a scene funnier just by existing in it. Not on Jim Carrey’s level, of course, but somewhere in that world of actors who know how to perform with more than dialogue. Still, even he cannot carry the entire film when the writing keeps running in circles. Samara Weaving did not really work for me here. I do not know whether the problem is the performance, the character, or the lack of chemistry with Segel, but Lisa never pulled me in. Even the anger felt strangely flat. Timothy Olyphant’s Pete also confused me more than entertained me. He is presented as this dangerous brain behind the prison escape, but then the film keeps making him seem weirdly stupid, to the point where I started wondering how the escape even worked in the first place. Keith Jardine’s Todd probably made me laugh the most, in the simplest possible way. He is basically the classic dumb muscle character, a brute and a clown, and while the film still was not especially funny, his kind of primitive stupidity landed more than most of the other jokes. The violence is also a mixed bag. I understand the idea: make it exaggerated, nasty and absurd enough that it becomes part of the joke. But for me, it often felt unnecessary rather than funny. Gore alone is not a punchline. Absurdity alone is not comedy. At some point, the film seemed to think that if it kept adding another body, another injury, another insane turn, the humor would appear by itself. It did not. And that is probably my main problem with Over Your Dead Body. It is busy, loud and constantly moving, but not especially clever, not especially tense and not especially enjoyable. I was not bored because nothing was happening. I was bored because everything was happening and almost none of it mattered. There is a much better version of this idea in something like Mr. & Mrs. Smith. That film had chemistry, tension, charm, action and characters you actually wanted to watch. Over Your Dead Body has the basic idea of a toxic couple trying to destroy each other, but it lacks the spark that would make that premise satisfying. By the end, my biggest feeling was not shock, laughter or tension. It was relief that the film was finally over. Honestly, if it had ended earlier, around the pier, I probably would have liked the ending more. Instead, it kept going, and by that point I was already done. A dark comedy can be cruel. It can be stupid. It can be bloody. It can be ridiculous. But it still has to be funny. For me, this one mostly wasn’t. 3/10

More Hollywood junk made to poison people's minds. I swear its like one good film and ten bad ones per month with these studios