Body Bends

Earlier this spring, The Drama was released an audacious and surprising movie about modern marriage that drew controversy but has connected with audiences. Now there’s Over Your Dead Body, a much worse dark comedy about marriage that tries to be daring and shocking but fails. I think the biggest problem was that I never believed the central couple loved or hated each other.

In this remake of the Norwegian film The Trip, the setup is that Dan and Lisa (Jason Segel and Samara Weaving) are a married couple—he’s a filmmaker-turned-commercial director, while she’s an actress— who no longer like each other. They’re headed to a lake house for a long weekend, although the film wastes little time in setting up its real premise: husband and wife secretly plan to kill each other.

The problem is that while I’ve enjoyed Segel as a performer, he’s not believable as someone who’d do violence to his wife, or to anyone else. Samara Weaving is practically a professional Final Girl, often seen emerging at the end of movies, bloodied but alive. She’s believable getting into scraps with violent people.

But Jason Segel? He’s not a killer. And Weaving, for her part, makes rare use of her real Australian accent, while spending much of the film dressed like Elizabeth Holmes for some reason. Immediately after Over Your Dead Body, at SpringFest, I saw her in a much better film, Carolina, Caroline.

Before long, though, the premise adjusts when the couple’s joined by a trio of escaped convicts, Timothy Olyphant and Keith Jardine, and a fallen prison guard, played by the movie’s unquestioned MVP, Juliette Lewis. Predictably, the married couple doesn’t kill each other but rather teams up against their new rivals. The rest of the movie is a series of violent confrontations, some of which are creative, and some of which aren’t funny, starting with the near-rape scene.

The film also takes on a reactionary streak, as Dan’s nursing home resident father (Paul Guilfoyle) early on essentially calls his son a pussy and says, “You need a war” to toughen him up. The dad, needless to say, is proven right. Over Your Dead Body was directed by Jorma Taccone, from the Lonely Island, who co-directed Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, which I’ve never loved as much as some others. The script was written by the duo of Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney, who recently made their directorial debut with the Hulu comedy Pizza Movie, one of my least favorite films of the year. This is better than that, but just barely.