R.I.P.D

R.I.P.D

Lord save us.  If you’re a fan of the Men in Black movies, prepare to have your soul raped by this unapologetic rip off.  It is eerily similar to the M.I.B movies, but without any of the redeeming qualities or charm of its predecessor. 

Men in Black? Never heard of it.

Bear with me, I lost interest in this film and got drunk after about 35 minutes, but I did take some drunken notes to help me write this.

The Plot

Nick (Ryan Reynolds) and Hayes (Kevin Bacon) are partners on the Boston Police Force who are a touch dirty.  One day while on a raid, Hayes decides to waste Nick for seemingly no reason whatsoever.  Nick, being the main character of this atrocity, can’t die this early can he?  Unfortunately no, he can’t.  He finds himself in an interrogation room, and almost without question, accepts the fact that he must serve 100 years for the undead police force called the R.I.P.D. (Rest In Peace Department).  The R.I.P.D serves the department of Eternal Affairs by apprehending the undead that roam the earth disguised as humans, referred to as Deados (yeah seriously).  

Nick, being a street savvy, modern police officer, is paired with the most unorthodox, old school officer the R.I.P.D has (kind of like in MIB where Smith, the street savvy cop is paired with the old scool…. Nevermind).  Jeff Bridges plays Roy, a revolver toting, western abomination of a law enforcer.  The two begin tracking down Deados and immediately stumble upon a huge conspiracy in which the Deados are willing to die (or I guess go to Hell or whatever) to collect specific pieces of gold.  This is where I gave up and began to drink heavily.  After following some leads, in which Nick is an effective investigator and Roy is all but useless (and fucking annoying), the boys stumble onto Nick’s old partner Hayes, who appears to be working for the Deados.  The Deados plan to piece together a gold portal to bring all the Deados down from heaven and infest the earth for some reason that is never entirely explained.  Can our beloved R.I.P.D force stop them? 

My Take

I started watching this movie confused, and continued to watch confused until the credits rolled.  Who was this film made for?  There are tons of cartoonish action scenes where we feel forced to charitably give pity laughs when somebody is hit in the face repeatedly, or shot in the bum, or if a fat person is fat.

As you can see, fat person is very fat.  Start laughing NOW!!

  Meanwhile Roy is flying all over the place cheering and emitting one liners through his horrific and unintelligible accent.  There are a couple disconnected romantic scenes between Nick and his girlfriend which indicates that at least part of this film had adults in mind.  The rest of this movie suggests it was made for kids ages 5-9. 

Ryan Reynolds mails in the same character he always does (good looking, charismatic and oh so cool).  If I didn’t know better I would say he used a body double and they just CG’d his face from Blade Trinity onto it.  The reason I know they didn’t do that was because the CG in this film was utterly terrible and there is no way that they could pull that off.

Again with the comedy in this film.  There is a difference between clever irony and slapstick.  Reynolds being hit in the face is slapstick.  Bridges flying around all over the place hoofing and hollering is slapstick. 

CG hair, Seriously?

Reynolds being portrayed as a Chinese man is slapstick, and possibly racist (the Deado’s main weakness is Indian food, so definitely racist).

The Deados are formed out of pure awfulness.  They are basically retarded and fail miserably at everything they try to do.  Every time Reynolds or Bridges wastes one of them, I feel a little bit bad about myself.  No matter what they are called, the mentally challenged deserve better than to be shot point blank in the face while they are muttering nonsense.  Heroes are supposed to face some kind of adversity at some point in a film, and overcome it.  In this movie, the only adversity the duo faces is who gets to shoot more of the mentally delayed Deados in the face.  If you’re going to say Reynold’s girlfriend getting captured is an adversity come on, she would have never been captured in the first place if she wasn’t hoping to hump Kevin Bacon. 

The Verdict

If you have kids and don’t care at all about quality of film, this movie is probably ok, except they swear so maybe not.  I still don’t really get it and I’m not sure how anybody really enjoyed this film.  The only good thing I read about this movie is that it’s not as bad as everyone says, that’s not a compliment people.   I found myself grimacing uncomfortably so many times throughout this movie.  I feel bad for Ryan Reynolds, and I hope he manages to come out with a good movie at some point in his career.

3/10