Friday, September 11, 2015

R.I.P.D.


RATING: F

Sometimes, we the movie consumers/reviewers/critics make stupid mistakes. Sometimes, we decide to go and watch a movie that not very many people liked. The critics didn't like it, the audience didn't like it. And yet, for some reason, we still decide to go and make ourselves watch certain movies. And of course, at the end, we're left going "What the crap did I just watch? And why did I choose to put myself through this?" 

R.I.P.D. is one of those movies (getting a 13% rating on Rotten Tomatoes) that unfortunately had just enough good marketing to pique my mild interest. Described as a Men In Black ripoff, this film focuses on the bland character of Ryan Reynolds--er, I mean Nick Walker--who is shot and killed during a drug bust. But instead of going to "Judgment," as it is referred to in this movie, he goes to... the R.I.P.D. (Rest In Peace Department) where the afterlife powers decide they want his skills to help keep evil souls who refuse to go on to the afterlife from from being seen in the world. And he gets partnered with a long-dead Wild West soul in Roy (Jeff Bridges) to serve his purpose there. 

I mean, on principle, it doesn't *sound* that bad. A little corny/campy, maybe, but not particularly horrendous. However, it does seem as if the people behind this film took every opportunity they could to screw this up. Thankfully, it's a pretty short film at 96 minutes, but there's still a lot of nothing besides exposition happening during the first 50-55 minutes. We end up getting fed quite a bit of dumb monsters as well, and Jeff Bridges's Wild West dialect is nearly incomprehensible at times (this may have been on purpose, but still). 

One of the film's biggest downfalls is the utterly relentless crass/racist/sexist "humor." When Nick and Roy go back to Earth to do their jobs, they actually look like someone else instead. Nick's "avatar" is an old Chinese dude (a lot of racist humor is employed on that front). Even worse is Roy's avatar, which is a female model--thus leading to a fair amount of weird gender-bending crassness. Add onto that an appalling line about what happened to Roy's skull after he died, and I nearly ejected the DVD at that point. 

Despite all of the "lot of no action" going on and all of the crass humor, we're actually given a fairly entertaining apocalyptic climax. Unfortunately, even that has a drawback--considering the fact that it seems almost clear that they could've given us more, and something better, but instead they chose to gave us about 80 minutes of boredom and dreck and about 15 minutes of actual entertainment. 

I fail to see just who R.I.P.D. is aimed towards. Was it perhaps meant to be camp? At times it kind of feels like camp. And there are other times when you just wonder, "What were they thinking?" Sure, there are some funny moments here and there, and as mentioned before, the ending is actually fairly entertaining. It's just too bad that you have to sit through all that other stuff in the process. So here's a better idea: just skip this film and don't make a bad decision like I did. 

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