Seriously, what has happened to Ryan Reynolds’s career? And why is Jeff Bridges doing dreck like this (which wasn’t even screened for press before its release)? You have six Academy Award nominations! Can you really be hurting this badly for cash? Those are the kind of questions you’ll have while watching “R.I.P.D.,” because the plot is so nonsensical and inarticulate and terrible that you’ll stop trying to figure out the movie after a while. Your mind will wander. You might nap. Anything, literally anything, would be better than watching this movie. Stay home and get a start on your taxes for 2014 or something; even trying to understand complicated tax laws and worrying about how much money you’ll owe next year will be better than giving “R.I.P.D.” any of your time or attention.
The film, based on the Dark Horse comic book “Rest in Peace Department” by Peter M. Lenkov, supposedly had a $130 million budget, but I’m not sure where that money went; it certainly isn’t apparent onscreen. Instead, everything looks determinedly low-budget, fuzzy and blurry and incoherent. The 3-D makes all that badness even more murky and dark, and just … blergh. That’s the only word. Blergh.
“R.I.P.D.” is focused on Nick (Reynolds, of “Turbo”), an officer with the Boston Police Department who is concerned he’s not providing a good-enough life for his beautiful French wife, Julia (Stephanie Szostak, of “Iron Man 3”); that worry leads him to steal pieces of gold from a drug bust with his partner, Hayes (Kevin Bacon, of “Crazy, Stupid, Love.”). But then Nick’s concern switches to worry over getting caught, so he tells Hayes he’s going to come clean—and Hayes kills him before he can. Since, you know, he was a dirty cop anyway, so why wouldn’t he hurt Nick if Nick was going to blab?
But no, that’s just the beginning of the increasingly idiotic storytelling of “R.I.P.D.” So Nick, now dead, gets pulled aside before being judged and is recruited by Proctor (Mary Louise-Parker, of “Red 2”) to the Rest in Peace Department. Dead humans who escape judgment and hide out on Earth are who cause all death, sickness, global warming, bad cell phone reception (no joke; those final two are explicitly described by Proctor), and other ills of the world, and it’s up to the R.I.P.D. to gather them up and deliver them to hell so the regular world can carry on living.
The length of service is 100 years, and that’s how Nick is paired with Roy (Bridges, of “True Grit” and “TRON: Legacy”), who fought for the North during the Civil War but is still gathering up Dead-Os (the nickname given by the R.I.P.D. to the monsters they track down). Neither of them wants a partner; they’re both grumpy and bitter; blah blah blah. Have you seen “Men in Black”? Then you know everything about where this film will go from here. The two don’t like each other, but then through some series of events, they grow to respect each other as they try to save the world!
Obviously.
But jeez, are there so, so many things wrong here. Every line of dialogue is trite and surface (like Julia saying to Nick, “I have everything I need right here” the morning before his death, or Roy mumbling, “I’m a one-man operation”), perhaps because the comic book was written by one person, but then three people worked on the film’s story, and then another person worked on the screenplay? That number shows in the film’s completely inconsistent tone, which starts out dramatic but then attempts to be comedic and eventually settles into anticlimax mode as the film zooms toward a predictable conclusion. So, so predictable.
Sure, Reynolds gets some one-liners in there, and Bridges will get a few chuckles with his grizzled old guy act, and Parker’s sarcasm could, I suppose, be winning to some. But that’s all in the most minor of minorities; otherwise this film is a deluge of poorly executed action scenes and badly written dialogue. It’s a mess, and “R.I.P.D.” has thrown down the gauntlet for the rest of 2013—I’m scared to see what could ever top this level of awful.
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