Review: ‘R.I.P.D.’

Well that was a big old waste of everyone’s time and money. I would add “effort” to the list of items of things wasted in the making and viewing of this movie, but sadly that seems to be the one thing that wasn’t even deployed in the first place in the making of “R.I.P.D.”

Hmmm, maybe that’s a little harsh. Let’s start with some positives.

“R.I.P.D.” is a movie about a police department for the dead. When Boston PD veteran and kind of dirty cop Nick (Ryan Reynolds, Safe House, The Change Up) gets killed in the line of duty, he’s given a choice – he can face judgment and the likely scenario of eternal damnation, or he can join the Rest In Peace Department, which is filled with dead lawmen whose job it is to make sure that the dead stay dead, as some of these bad souls escape judgment and manage to continue living on Earth with all us alive people.

This is a cute set up (the movie is adapted from a comic book), and at least they are ripping off good movies liker “Ghostbusters” and “Men in Black.” It is as if their hearts were in the right place all along. Reynolds is fine enough, though for a movie that seems to want to be clever and smart, his character really just spends a lot of time moping around and being sad that he’s dead and can’t be with his wife anymore. And his partner is an Old West lawman named Roy (Jeff Bridges, True Grit), who stomps around like a live action Yosemite Sam and embodies every movie cliché about Old West town sheriffs imaginable. Reynolds and Bridges are both good, with Bridges getting just about whatever laughs there are to be had in this thing.

Mary-Louise Parker and Kevin Bacon are also both in this movie, and they do just fine. It’s always nice to see them in something. So that’s good.

Okay, that’s really all I got for positives for this movie. Which is a shame because there is some potential there, it just seems like they were just coasting on the main idea of the story and didn’t bother actually doing anything with it.

For example, there’s a nice idea in the movie about the “Universe’s Witness Protection Program,” which means that when dead spirits like Nick’s and Roy’s walk around the living, they don’t look like Nick and Roy, because the Universe doesn’t want to scare people (?), so they have “cover identities” and appear different to the living. So Nick looks like an old Chinese guy (played by living legend James Hong, Blade Runner, Big Trouble in Little China) and old sour puss Roy looks like a hot blonde (played by model Marisa Miller), and really this should have been a goldmine of comedy, to have Nick and Roy doing stuff that cops would do, and then to cut to someone’s perspective and seeing an old man and a model kicking down a door or getting into a shoot out (with a ghostly spirit, to boot!). There are really only a handful of gags regarding this identity thing, most of them involve people staring at Roy because they see a hot lady, and only one of these gags actually elicits any actual laughs. What a waste of a good premise.

And that can be applied to the whole movie. The ideas behind “R.I.P.D.” are decent, but they don’t add up to much of anything. The whole Nick and Roy relationship is yanked right out “48 Hrs.” or “Tango & Cash” or “Lethal Weapon” or any other number of mismatched buddy cop action comedies. Really, when Nick was introduced to Roy as his new partner, and Roy gave the ole “I work alone!” sound byte that we’ve all heard a billion times, I almost couldn’t believe that they were going to be that lazy with the set up (then again, we’ve seen this exact thing before very recently, haven’t we?).

And lo and behold, yet another movie which climaxes with some sort of energy beam shooting out from the middle of a major city and connecting to an open portal in the sky, which will allows for bad things to come to Earth. Because we haven’t seen THIS stupid fucking plot point in every other summer blockbuster for the last three or four years. At least “Pacific Rim” had the common courtesy of putting this portal beam to another dimension underwater, giving us a slight variation on this newly developed and quickly worn out plot device.

“R.I.P.D.” is nothing more than slightly amusing at best, and shopworn and kind of boring at worst. And we won’t even get into the incredibly shoddy CG, which makes all the “dead” people in this movie look like video game characters (and yes, that is a bad thing to have in your $100+ million movie), or the boring plot reveals and “twists” that are predictable and, well, just plain old boring. This could have been a cool, fun movie. Instead it has evil soul stank all over it and it just doesn’t work like it should.