This review is based on a screening at the South by Southwest Film & TV Festival. Over Your Dead Body will be released in theaters on April 24.
In Jorma Taccone’s bloody action comedy, Over Your Dead Body, Jason Segel and Samara Weaving play a married New York couple whose relationship is on the rocks. When the film begins, it seems like a quiet trip to the Catskills might solve their problems; when their tensions don’t subside, it quickly turns out they both have secret plans to kill one another for life insurance. However, much like their secret schemes which soon go up in smoke, the movie ends up going pretty far off track with repetitive, over-the-top set pieces and a tone that gets mean and uncomfortable when it ought to remain a delight.
Written by Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney (of the online sketch group BriTANicK), Taccone’s marriage satire is a nearly beat-for-beat remake of Tommy Wirkola’s The Trip, or I Onde Dager (“In Bad Days”), but it departs from the Norwegian original’s bleakness with some overt, broad comedy befitting the names involved. Taccone was, after all, half-responsible for the modern comedy classic, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, and as a co-founder of The Lonely Island, he’s no stranger to hilarity.
It’s for this reason that failing film director Dan (Segel) makes for such a fun, intriguing protagonist. We meet him as he curiously reminds friends and coworkers alike that he and stage actress wife Lisa (Weaving) are all set for their wilderness hike. This starts to seem more like the search for an alibi as he purchases suspicious tools like rope and duct tape. It’s one of Segel’s funnier roles, as well as one of his most dramatically fine-tuned, given the way he juggles exaggerated exhaustion with an inferiority complex supposedly brought on by constant spousal criticism.
Through Dan’s point of view, Lisa is an irredeemably horrid person; all they seem to do is argue, even while headed for the cabin. However, the premise soon flips (along with the movie’s default POV) when Lisa turns her husband’s murderous plan on its head, revealing one of her own through snappy flashbacks. As the film goes on, numerous other characters come tumbling into the couple’s narrative, including two escaped convicts (Timothy Olyphant, Keith Jardine) and their turncoat corrections officer (Juliette Lewis), turning the film from a marriage satire into a home invasion comedy-thriller in the vein of a goofy Straw Dogs. This transformation – pulled from the original, where it involves three male escapees – works in theory, but its execution and adaptation function rather strangely. Of course, like any other film, Over Your Dead Body deserves to be evaluated on its own merits, but comparisons to the original are nothing if not instructive about where it falters.
The laugh-out-loud gags are a wonderful addition, affording the rubber-faced Segel and the more straightforward Weaving numerous spats and tête-à-têtes, including a side-splitting bizarro version of the “I’ll have what she’s having” scene from When Harry Met Sally, swapping out fake orgasms for soap opera acting. When the couple are at each other’s throats – at times literally – the unfettered stunt choreography imbues the remake with a raucous energy that wasn’t present in Wirkola’s version. However, where the original succeeded was in its snappy unspooling. The two films are comparable in length; in fact, the original is slightly longer, but its constant forward momentum left no time for the audience’s attention to stray, or for them to ever question the premise. It’s far more airtight in this regard, but the remake’s dead air and vestigial dialogue provides too much room for a double-take as to why Dan and Lisa seem to suddenly undergo a 180-degree character change so the rest of the plot can happen.
Even if one were to forgive the occasional inconsistency, there are dramatic, comedic, and thematic holes which the remake’s more gradual pacing fails to paper over. Where the original’s protagonist was a Jewish man, and the home invaders included a ruthless utilitarian and a Neo-Nazi, there are no such nerve-wracking dimensions in the Hollywood version; its characters are interchangeable pieces. Olyphant and Lewis’ characters, who were male friends in the original, are an oddball couple here, but this added subplot is never used to reflect or contrast Dan and Lisa’s ongoing domestic drama, so it feels like dead weight.
While the remake is undoubtedly funnier, it adds a handful of tonal elements that make for occasionally uncomfortable viewing. For one thing, the threat of sexual violence is treated as a malformed joke in this version rather than a serious threat. For another, the combo of its exaggerated carnage and the presence of a female villain means that Over Your Dead Body concocts a number of action beats where the entire punchline relies on the subversive surprise of a woman being on the receiving end of souped-up male viciousness. Intentional or not, this is unpleasant.
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