I was hoping to make time for this after finally watching the film that it was based on (The Trip, directed by Tommy Wirkola), but sometimes things aren't meant to be. Which means I saw this was now on Amazon Prime and it seemed like the best way to spend some of my time this past weekend.
Dan (Jason Segel) and Lisa (Samara Weaving) are a married couple who don't love each other any more. Maybe a weekend break will help them. It will certainly help Dan once he's drugged and killed Lisa, then disposed of her body in the nearby lake. Dan isn't too smart though, which allows Lisa to soon cotton on to what he's planning. And she has her own plan. Both of them may try to kill one another, but they might also both be shown exactly how they should do things by three dangerous fugitives (played by Timothy Olyphant, Juliette Lewis, and Keith Jardine).
Written by Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney, working from the screenplay co-written by Wirkola, Nick Ball, and John Niven, Over Your Dead Body is the kind of film best described as a deliciously dark comedy. It's just a shame that all of the real deliciousness and darkness appears in the third act, and doesn't quite do enough to make up for the disappointments elsewhere in the runtime.
Segel and Weaving are both great performers, but neither of them are doing their best work here. It would have been nice to have more scenes letting them be more vicious to each other, but we instead just get standard griping and poor communication underlining where they both are in their marriage (the end, they're both at the end of it). Everything picks up when a strange trio gatecrash the planned violence, thanks mainly to a typically brilliant turn from Olyphant, although he's almost matched by a lovestruck Lewis. Jardine has to play a strong idiot, which he does fine, but his character is the least interesting of the core selection. The other person to mention is Paul Guilfoyle, playing a grumpy and critical father who believes that a war would be the best thing for his son. Guilfoyle is casually dismissive and careless without seeming loathsome, and he gets a couple of great moments when he comes back into the picture after his earliest scenes.
I've enjoyed some other work from director Jorma Taccone (especially the brilliant Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping), but I believe he works better with light and silly fare. Whether it's the source material or the very wobbly tonal tightrope here, he's not able to do as well here. Mind you, I am not sure many people would be able to spin gold from a sequence in which someone is threatened with anal rape if they don't promise to hand over enough money to help some desperate criminals finalise their escape plan.
If you like the stars then you'll get something from this, and there are some fantastic gore gags in the last 15-20 minutes, but it's just a shame that there wasn't more energy running through this. From the dialogue to the score, nothing really works in the first hour that helps it to get anywhere close to being as entertaining as the finale. I'll be interested to see if the original does it any better.
4/10
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