Movie Review: R.I.P.D.

R.I.P.D. (2013)

A recently slain cop joins a team of undead police officers working for the Rest in Peace Department and tries to find the man who murdered him.  Short synopsis of R.I.P.D. taken from IMDb.com   

RIPD had a feel of a mix between Men In Black and Ghostbusters.  This might seem a good thing, but really RIPD didn't pull it off as successfully as one would hope.  Basically, we have a simple bad-cop-kills-good-cop story (well kinda good, but good cop did a bad thing and ended up in "purgatory" when he was just trying to take care of his family... more on that momentarily).   Ryan Reynolds plays the good cop-gone-to-death-before-his-time and then put in the "Rest In Peace" Department because he stole some gold while at a drug bust.  Kevin Bacon is his bad guy partner who, while involved in a high-octane shoot out early in the film, kills Reynold's character.  And he seemed like such a nice character, Bacon's guy did.  Yeah, right.  You could see that bullet to Reynold's cranium coming a long ways off here.  So much for surprises, I thought as I watched RIPD.

Then Lloyd Bridges enters the picture, and things get tolerably better for awhile.  Bridges's cantankerous marshal is fun to watch in action, at the beginning.  Unfortunately, things start to fall apart half-way through.  There is a rather forced scene where Reynolds, frustrated from Bridge's orneriness, complains that the old man doesn't know what real pain is.  Bridges responds by mentioning how, when he died and coyotes carried off his bones (a recurring joke in the film that gets old fast), one of them performed sexual acts upon his corpse.  This is supposed to be funny, but it falls flat.  Almost as flat as the over-use of CGI the film also suffers from. 

For Jeff Bridges, I suppose the role of Roy Pulsipher in R.I.P.D. must have been like taking True Grit's Rooster Cogburn and turning him slapstick.  Still, ya got to hand it to Bridges, as he does what he can with what he's given. / Source: glogster.com

What about that CGI, you ask?  Well, it seemed over-used to me.  You could tell things were fake in places, even when they might have been tried with practical effects.  Like the filmmakers have a big budget on the computer rendering, but not so big a budget on the rest, so they'll just make everything CGI and worry about the audience's perceptions of it later.  And we're not talking George Lucas's Star Wars prequels here.  Sure, much of that series of movies looked off too, but the scenes were so fantastic in their very nature as to imbibe some credulity.  But in RIPD, so much feels like "oh, fake car, oh, fake person getting pulled into the air, oh, fake deformations of the "dead-o", etc...  It gets rather predictable after awhile.

Oh, and I'm going to almost completely ignore the hot blond girl as Lloyd Bridges body double, and the old Chinese guy as Reynolds.  It was funny at times, but also got old by the end.  And the recurring use of scenes in which we slip over to a human perspective and see men looking at Bridges female shell was funny in the first take, but like most of the film... well, you get the idea here.  It got old.

As shown in this clip, the climax of the film felt more like a video game than a movie, with a slo-mo, clearly CGI-infested shootout on the rooftop capping the film off.

I often feel bad when I criticize a film that I know was trying to do what it could to deliver the entertainment goods.  After all, I'd be up a creek if I was faced with similar problems in telling or delivering such a story.  But RIPD just doesn't rate a high repeat value.  In fact, I'm glad I saw it in the cheap seats, with my student ID discount.  It would have been worth that much, or a Redbox rental, but not much more.  The story is predictable for the most part.  The action is standard stuff.  The characters do save much of it, but even they seem to be struggling to give what might be called a "mis-directed work" a sort of life that it just... well the RIP part of RIPD seems to fit here.  Sad to say, as I was really hoping this movie would be good.  But it just wasn't.  Mindless popcorn entertainment, but it has enough holes in it to make even the brain-dead hour and a half you spend seem a bit... well, dead.

The parting comment:

Source: LOLSnaps.com

When your breakfast is looking back at you and it's Fruit Loops and pancakes, I'd say upping your meds might be in order.