Critic Reviews

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.

It’s an adept translation that is in turns bloody and cruel, insightful and hilarious, and, under the plentiful gore and uproarious laughter, a surprisingly touching drama. Just one with slapstick bloodbath tendencies.

Instead of the sharp satire of modern-day relationships it starts out as, “Over Your Dead Body” becomes a gross-out comedy in its second half. While it’s very good in both of those modes, it can’t help but feel a bit disappointing that it takes such a sharp turn from something that’s both fun and perceptive to something that’s just fun.

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.

Whoever enlisted Jorma Taccone to direct this deserves a raise, given that the charter member of the Lonely Island understands how to consistently ramp things up to levels of high ridiculousness.

The Lonely Island brand of humor might at first seem like an awkward fit for horror, but there’s an art to the timing of a well-done splatter flick that shares filmmaking DNA with comedy.

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.

It seems like Over Your Dead Body is caught between deconstructing itself and just going through the motions.

Jason Segel and Samara Weaving get laughs, but their murder comedy is total tonal chaos.

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.