R.I.P.D

Widely regarded as the biggest box office flop of the year thus far, action / comedy / sci-fi R.I.P.D. cost over $130 million to produce, and scuttled out of American cinemas with barely $30 million of that made back, not to mention the slating it got by the U.S. critics. So the real question isn’t whether or not this movie is good or bad, more just how bad is it? The good news is that it's not THAT bad. The bad news, unfortunately, is that it’s still rather disappointing.

Police officer Ryan Reynolds is killed by his dodgy partner Kevin Bacon, and mid-trip to the afterlife, gets pulled aside by Mary Louise Parker’s chief of the Boston branch of the RIPD, aka the Rest In Peace Department. He’s promptly partnered up with Jeff Bridges’ old west law man, who has apparently spent the last few hundred years making absolutely no changes to his personality or wardrobe. They’re there to protect the living world from the few escaped dead souls on Earth, and soon they discover some plan involving some ancient form of evil and an impending apocalypse. Ye know, the usual.

In case you were wondering, yes, this is basically Men In Black with the aliens replaced by ghosts, but also with the comedy replaced by… whatever the word is for when comedy just isn’t funny. Everyone in this film should’ve worked fantastically in their roles, as nobody is stretching too far from characters they’ve played before. Sadly, a dour, sullen script zaps most of the fun out of the concept. Bridges does raise a few chuckles as he’s clearly having a ball in his role, but the laughs come less from what he’s saying and more so from how he’s saying it. His delivery is spot on.

The only excitement is the few action sequences, which are very interestingly shot, but the editing is all over the place, often leaving you confused as to where most of the characters are in each scene. While watching this movie, it will suddenly become apparent that this would’ve made a fantastic video-game, and that’s sometimes what it feels like; watching someone else play a video game that you don’t fully understand the rules of.