OVER HER DEAD BODY

It’s very tempting to make some cheesy comment about only seeing this movie over my/your/her/somebody’s dead body and then moving on, but that’s too easy.  This is a formula movie all the way.  Two people meet for some odd reason. One person does something bad to get the other person to like them.  It works.  The other person finds about the bad thing and calls it off.  The first person has to explain that it wasn’t really so bad ...  etc. 

All of this unfolds within the context of a story about a woman who dies unceremoniously at her own wedding and then comes back to haunt the psychic who meets her bereaved fiancé.  Yes, really.  Throw in an ambiguously gay/unambiguously clumsy best friend, Stephen Root as history’s most disinterested angel, a meddling ditzy sister, a flatulent fart joke scene, a talking parrot medium (yes, really), and multiple additional jokes at the expense of an overweight golden Labrador and you have solid comedy bronze. 

It’s not that there aren’t a few amusing moments, and Paul Rudd is quite appealing as the almost widower, but the story feels driven only by the imperative of the formula and not by anything resembling believability in the characters.  For example, we have to start out by believing that Paul Rudd misses Eva Longoria Parker enough to spend a year mourning her loss.  But from what very little we see of her while alive, along with what more we see of her while dead, matched against what we see of him, it’s virtually impossible to believe they would ever have been together as a couple in the first place.  It leaves you wondering why he hasn’t been partying for a year to celebrate the death that saved him from a lifetime of bitchery.  Hell, I wanted to celebrate just because the movie ended.  Well, but for the ominous final scene that seems to threaten the possibility of a sequel.  Over somebody’s dead body indeed.

-Anthony Sheppard
tony@retrocrush.com