R.I.P.D.

 

I'm sure at some point, R.I.P.D. had some spark of inspiration behind it.  But, either through studio tampering or just a plain bad script, the inspiration got diluted, and now the end result is a failed summer blockbuster made out of the bits and pieces of more successful films.  The premise immediately brings to mind the Men in Black films, only with lost departed souls terrorizing the Earth instead of aliens.  The relationship between its two stars, Ryan Reynolds and Jeff Bridges, brings to mind many a mismatched buddy comedy, only done horribly limp here.  Even one of the film's villains kind of resembles a CG version of Fat Bastard from the Austin Powers movies.  Is there anything in this film that wasn't borrowed?

The movie (based on a comic book) tells a simple story that I can picture working with a different approach than the one employed here.  Ryan Reynolds plays a Boston police officer named Nick.  Through hurried exposition, we learn only two things about him - He has a pretty young girlfriend living at home with him (Stephanie Szotak), and he recently helped his crooked partner on the police force, Hayes (Kevin Bacon), steal some gold from a drug dealer during a recent bust.  Nick's been having second thoughts about the gold lately, and tells his doubts to his partner right before they're about to raid another dealer's warehouse.  This leads to Hayes shooting and killing Nick in the middle of the drug bust.  Nick's soul heads to the afterlife where he is immediately recruited to the R.I.P.D. (Rest In Peace Department) - a supernatural police force that keeps dead souls that haven't yet crossed over, and remain on Earth causing trouble, in line.

His new job teams Nick up with another member of the force, an Old West lawman named Roy (Jeff Bridges, who slurs his lines so much that some of them are unintelligible).  The two head back down to Earth to investigate a plan by the evil lost souls to gather the pieces of an ancient device that could open a permanent doorway between Earth and the afterlife, and allow the souls to conquer the world.  The main running gag of the film is that whenever Nick and Roy are down on Earth, they look like other people.  Nick is seen by others as an elderly Chinese man, while Roy appears as a beautiful blonde female supermodel.  Apparently, this is so no one on Earth will recognize them, since they're supposed to be dead.  I can understand why this would be necessary for Nick, as he just recently died.  But Roy's been gone for over a hundred years.  Surely no one would recognize him. 

Of course, we're not supposed to be thinking about things like that while watching the movie.  And I wouldn't be thinking about it if R.I.P.D. gave me something to think about, other than how lame the whole thing is.  While it moves by at a fairly brisk 95 minutes, it never truly engages our interest.  The jokes fall flat, the action is trite and forgettable, and the chemistry between Reynolds and Bridges is virtually non-existent.  They act like they barely want to spend time with each other, and as the film wore on, I started to sympathize with them, as I didn't want to spend any more time with either of them.  Even the special effects fail to impress, and that's one element you'd expect a movie with a reported budget of $130 million to at least get right.  The creature effects are lame, and the afterlife is depicted as nothing more than a bland-looking office space.  Ho hum.

Where did the budget go for this thing?  Surely it wasn't the script, or the actors, or the special effects.  Just about every element that went into the making of this film is bland and immediately forgettable.  Clearly the studio knew this, as they released it quietly this past weekend without screening it for critics.  The question then becomes, why waste a valuable July summer date on a movie like this?  This plays like a film that should have come out over Labor Day weekend (routinely one of the lowest grossing weekends for movies), where it would play to mostly empty houses and disappear quickly.  Instead, by releasing it in the midst of the big summer movies, you only draw attention to the film's faults, and make it a bigger disaster than it needed to be.

 

R.I.P.D. seems to have been mishandled in just about every area you could think of - Planning, execution, and even its release.  It's clear that no one had any faith in it, so the fact that they're now asking audiences to pay to watch it is kind of cynical.  I also just learned that the movie is also being shown in 3D (it wasn't in my area), so I guess the attempts to make it a total cash grab went all-out.

See the movie times in your area or buy the DVD at Amazon.com!

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