Jorma Taccone’s Over Your Dead Body, a remake of violent Norwegian comedy The Trip, concerns a married couple (Jason Segel and Samara Weaving) who each plan to kill the other on their weekend getaway at a remote cabin. It joins a long lineage of films set around the erosion of a marriage and a shorter, less noble legacy of films in which Samara Weaving is nearly murdered by her husband (Ready or Not and its recent sequel). Expecting trenchant commentary on the matrimonial institution from one-third of The Lonely Island remaking a film from the director of Violent Night (that’s the one where Santa Claus fights like John Wick) is probably a fool’s errand, and the film indeed hews closer to hack “take my wife… please!” comedy than acutely observed insight into heteronormative relationships. But it blessedly finds a different gear that manages the task of grossout entertainment, even if it still never manages to say much of anything.
When we first meet Segel’s Dan, the washed-up commercial filmmaker is setting the stage for his wife’s disappearance, telling a colleague he seems to have never spoken to before about his planned trip to the cabin and the very dangerous conditions in the mountains where his wife, Lisa, insists on hiking. At the cabin he begins to make preparations, checking the gun safe, loading a heavy bag of rocks onto his boat, and prepares steaks for Lisa’s last meal. But when he goes to make his move, the tables are turned, and Lisa shocks him with a taser. He awakens strapped to a chair and the pair list their grievances with one another — the usual accretion of marital resentments, from infidelity to money problems to feelings of sexual inadequacy — before they begin battling physically. This stretch of the film is frankly tiresome, consisting of two people delivering lame, clichéd bits at one another. Taccone’s Lonely Island experience and the continued directorial career of his collaborator Akiva Schaffer are characterized by a sense of extreme silliness that Over Your Dead Body at this point sorely lacks. It is too normal to transcend its commonplace, trite comedy.
But then the film executes a bait and switch, introducing a trio of interloping fugitives who kidnap Dan and Lisa and transform the film into a home invasion thriller. If this development immediately clarifies the plot of the film — that Dan and Lisa’s marriage will effectively be saved by their shared ordeal should be obvious to anyone with even a passing familiarity with movies — it also alleviates the film of its more enervating qualities. Sure, the jokes don’t get that much funnier — see: a baffling number of Harry Potter references — and this pivot introduces tonal imbalances of its own, like a bizarre extended sexual assault gag that aims for both brutality and comedy only to end up tasteless and uncomfortable, but the Elmore Leonard-esque trio of bumbling criminals played by Timothy Olyphant, Keith Jardine, and Juliette Lewis infuse the film with a maniacal energy that is so dearly missing from the two-hander the film initially pretended to be.
And so, when the film eventually devolves into a juvenile, nihilistic orgy of extremely bloody violence, it’s… a lot of fun. Characters are smashed through walls, stabbed, and otherwise mutilated in madcap, gory sequences that transmute Taccone’s propensity for ludicrous gags into a delirious explosion of horror movie viscera. Heads explode, fingers are severed at the knuckle, and a foot endures some truly grotesque trauma. Often when an American remake of a violent or upsetting European film arrives, it has undergone serious changes that alter its character drastically, like the baffling happy endings appended onto the American versions of The Vanishing or Speak No Evil. Taccone, however, engages in a level of gleeful excess that would make The Trip’s director, Tommy Wirkola, proud. In dropping the pretense of having something to say to instead seek cheap thrills for genre fans, Over Your Dead Body delivers enough to hoot and holler about.
DIRECTOR: Jorma Taccone; CAST: Jason Segel, Samara Weaving, Timothy Olyphant, Juliette Lewis, Keith Jardine; DISTRIBUTOR: Independent Film Company; IN THEATERS: April 24; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 45 min.
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