Shambolic ‘R.I.P.D.’ delivers brainless fun
šš R.I.P.D. 3D. Director: Robert Schwentke. Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Bacon. Showing at: Nu Metro Walmer Park and the Boardwalk; Ster Kinekor the Bridge, Vincent Park and Hemingways.
LIKE its comic-strip characters, caught in the purgatory between life and death, this wildly uneven fantasy adventure inhabits a misjudged limbo between the mainstream riffs of Men in
Black and the rougher edges of Maniac Cop.
Ryan Reynolds is the only slightly crooked Boston cop, whisked to a netherworld owing more to A Life Less Ordinary than A Matter of Life
and Death, with the office furniture of Brazil thrown in for good measure. To escape judgment, Reynolds opts to serve undead overtime with the titular team, returning to Earth with Jeff Bridges’s old west sheriff, the odd-buddy couple taking on the avatars of James Hong and Marisa Miller respectively.
And if you think there’s nothing funny about the pairing of a short Asian guy and a tall underwear model, then R.I.P.D. is not for you. Quite who it is for remains a mystery; those young enough to laugh at the sub- MiB/ Ghostbusters monsters will be bored by the tragi-romantic backstory (Reynolds has left behind a loving wife, blah blah blah), and everyone else will be dismayed by the shambolic narrative and inconsistent tone.
The wonderfully strange Mary-Louise Parker – one of the stars of director Robert Schwentke’s previous comic-strip adaptation, Red – offers some much-needed edge, while Bridges merely turns up his gurning Rooster Cogburn act to 11, his eyes rolling north, his cheeks venturing east and west, his lower jaw dropping ever further into the deep south.
THE GOOD
Reynolds adopts his usual likeable screen persona for Nick, to solid effect; it also makes a refreshing change to have him adapt to his other-worldly circumstances so quickly, instead of R.I.P.D. spending half an hour on gormless, “What the hell is going on?” type of reactions and explanations.
There’s also amusing support from Parker, and Kevin Bacon makes an enjoyably cheerful villain, but the film really belongs to Bridges, who’s clearly having a whale of a time riffing on his True Grit performance, sparking appealing chemistry with Reynolds into the bargain and nabbing all the best lines.
R.I.P.D.’s script is a blatant rip-off of MiB (so much so that they’re probably owed royalties), but it delivers a decent amount of brainless fun and it does have a handful of nice ideas, such as the fact that “deaddos” are responsible for malfunctioning machinery or that dead Nick and Roy appear to the world as an old Chinese man and a beautiful blonde respectively.
THE BAD
The biggest problem with
R.I.P.D. is the special effects, which are decidedly dodgy and end up giving everything a cartoonish feel that is frequently distracting (to be fair, it may have been a deliberate attempt to reference the film’s graphic novel origins, but if that’s the case, it backfires).
On top of that, the script doesn’t spend enough time on relationships for the business with Szostak’s character to really mean anything, so it fails to achieve the intended emotional impact.
Overall, it’s a directionless mess: too expensive for a B-movie, too grown-up for a kids’ movie and too infantile for everyone else. © Mark Kermode