R.I.P.D. (2013)

Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Bacon, Mary-Louise Parker, Stéphanie Szostak, James Hong, Marisa Miller, and Mike O’Malley, with a voice cameo from Mike Judge
Grade: D-

When it came out, I couldn’t fathom why R.I.P.D. didn’t do well at the box office. Then, I watched it…

Summary

To open, we see Nick Walker (Reynolds) and his partner Roicephus “Roy” Pulsipher (Bridges) chase some gigantic human/monster hybrid. Through some narration, Nick explains that he works for the Rest in Peace Department, a thing he didn’t know existed three or four days ago.

We then jump back “3 or 4 Days Ago”, where we see Nick bury some chunks of gold in his backyard at night. Then, he plants a small orange tree right above the spot to hide it. The next morning, his wife Julia (Szostak) greets him in bed. Though she’s excited about having an orange tree, she says there’s no way this thing will last a winter in Boston. Nick brings up how it’s a symbol of prosperity but changes the subject, talking about how he’s worried about their financial situation. She’s not however and is perfectly fine with where they’re at because she’s with Nick. As she goes out on her morning run, Nick goes to work at the police department. He’s a detective sergeant, and he’s partners with Bobby Hayes (Bacon). Bobby asks him what he did with his share of the gold and Nick tells him he buried it, though he regrets it and says immediately after that he’s digging it up and putting it in evidence. He does tell Bobby that Bobby can still keep his share, but Nick just doesn’t want to be involved anymore. He regrets it all, especially after talking to his wife and realizing it was wrong. Bobby looks frustrated but admits Nick is right and says he will do the same. Following this, they are interrupted with news that some high-profile criminal named Garza has been spotted, springing the staff into action. Nick, Bobby, and a whole crew bust into some warehouse to stop Garza and get into a huge shootout. In the midst of the shootout, Bobby tells Nick he can’t let him turn in the gold. He shoots Nick who falls to his death.

Though he’s dead, he wakes up still in the warehouse, only to see everything currently happening in the warehouse seemingly on pause. As he walks around and observes, a hole opens in the sky, and Nick is sucked into it and off of Earth into some wormhole where he sees other bodies being transported. Then, he is thrown directly into some type of office building, sitting in a chair across from Mildred Proctor (Parker), head of the Rest in Peace Department.

She explains Nick has been “saved” for the time being. Officially, he’s dead and was on his way to probably being sent to Hell for his corrupt acts as a cop. Instead, he was brought to the R.I.P.D. to potentially make up for what he’s done. He was good at his job when he was alive, so the gamble makes sense. Anyway, the goal of the R.I.P.D. is to find dead people hiding out on Earth that managed to escape judgement and official death. Once they’re located, they have to be arrested and brought back to the department. Nick’s tour on the force will be 100 years if he says “Yes”, and he will be sent to the Boston precinct to start. Nick agrees to the terms, prompting Proctor to start explaining details about the “deados”, the dead human/monster hybrid people. These are the dead people Nick will be hunting down. They look like regular people until they “pop”. Because of this, the only people that know they actually look like monsters are the Rest in Peace Department. These deados cause a lot of issues too. If a person dies but stays on Earth, their soul, and their self, rots, and this can cause a myriad of issues like disease, global warming, etc. The reason there are so many of these deados on Earth that have somehow slipped through the cracks is because the “system” wasn’t designed to keep track of the massive amounts of people that die every day.

After getting the gist of everything, Nick is then shown the department. The Boston precinct of R.I.P.D. is the third largest in the force. A lot of the workers consist of law people from all time periods. Soon after, a deado tries to escape custody, but he’s shot by Nick’s new partner Roy. Roy is a former US Marshal from the Wild West days, and he’s got a very old school mentality towards enforcing the law. This doesn’t sit well with his superior in Proctor. It also doesn’t help that they used to date, and it did not end well. Roy isn’t too keen on getting a partner, so things are already off to a contentious start between him and Nick. The two then go to some door and room that closes in on them, and it transports them back to Earth, with the door opening to the back of a VCR repair shop in Boston. It’s a good spot to have the door between these two worlds because no one ever walks into a VCR repair shop anymore, and the owner looks like he’s 112 years old.

Since they’re back on Earth and Nick is still freaked out, they go to his own funeral for closure and watch as his wife Julia gets a hug from Bobby. Not being able to take it anymore, Nick runs to Julia to try and talk to her, but she doesn’t recognize him. It causes a scene, and he gets restrained by cops, as Bobby leaves with her. Following the funeral, Roy explains to Nick that she didn’t recognize him because they are given different identities and appearances upon entrance back into the real world, so alive humans see them as completely different people. Nick looks like an old Chinese man (Hong) and Roy is some hot blonde woman (Miller). As Nick and Roy start to get to know each other and go through their first mission together, Nick realizes that interrogating and capturing deados is harder than it seems. After Nick and Roy take one out on their first mission as a team, the deado pukes up some gold pieces identical to the one’s Nick and Bobby had in their possession that caused this big mess. This makes things very interesting for Nick, but Roy’s annoying self isn’t going to make this understanding process any easier.

My Thoughts:

Beforehand, I saw reviews saying that R.I.P.D. is basically a rip-off of Men in Black mixed with Ghostbusters. I didn’t believe it at first, but it’s sort of a true. I hate calling things “rip-offs” in most cases, like when any movie about space made after the 70s is automatically called a Star Wars rip-off, but the reason I have to classify R.I.P.D. as a rip-off, is because it did such a bad job at trying to separate itself from this inevitable comparison that it deserves the hate.

On paper, Ryan Reynolds and Jeff Bridges seem like a good, mismatched pairing of a young charismatic rookie and the old no-nonsense veteran that knows everything about the job. Though it’s hard to top the Will Smith/Tommy Lee Jones odd couple model, there’s no reason Reynolds and Bridges could’ve at least gotten close. Unfortunately, they weren’t in the same stratosphere. Reynolds wasn’t nearly as funny as he should’ve been, considering the idea we’re working with, and the action doesn’t make up for the film’s shortcomings at all. The idea for this movie is very “out there”. Because of this, I was expecting the action to be all over the place. Honestly, it was outrageously disappointing. The CGI and special effects were very good, but besides that, the only thing that stood out was Jeff Bridges’s odd portrayal of an old west lawman. He was clearly gung-ho about the role and goes all-in on the character, but he’s not really given much to do besides talking in his supremely distracting accent. Almost none of the big gags landed either. The first interrogation scene was just uncomfortable. The whole bit with the dead being set off by Indian food wasn’t nearly as funny as these writers clearly thought it was. I definitely could’ve gone without that closeup of Bridges eating it too. I could damn near smell the food through the screen.

The idea of having a police department to stop the dead and having to bring them back for potential eternal damnation is really cool. It’s a very special premise that needed extra care. With this in mind, I was expecting something avant-garde for the look of the department, as well as the movie as a whole. Strange is the name of the game for an idea like R.I.P.D. If they had a Tim Burton-like director, or a screenplay that thought a little more outside the box, we really could’ve had something here. Unfortunately, the writers seemed to have chosen misplaced humor over being inventive. It hit me right at the beginning when we see the actual department. There was no imagination to it whatsoever. The office setting is pretty mundane. Now, it seems to me that it’s laid out like this to play up the comedy and show us how similar it is to a regular police department, with the exception of a few details. The problem is that it just wasn’t very funny. Even in this scenario, there were so many possibilities of potential creative genius and that’s what is so frustrating. Assuming this department has been in existence for a while, we could’ve saw something like a 1930s private detective arguing with a parody of a maverick cop from a 1990s action movie. Little stuff like that would’ve made a difference, really showing how crazy this scenario is. They needed to show us more personality in the department like how we see in a movie like The Other Guys. Sadly, we only meet three people in the entirety of this exciting new world in R.I.P.D., two if you don’t count Nick. That’s it? There’s no one else worth meeting in this purgatory-like law enforcement place containing generations of cops and lawmakers?

It’s so interesting, but they just want to make the whole movie about the banter between Ryan Reynolds and Jeff Bridges! Guys, how can you miss out on so much with such a great idea?

Also, all of the main characters are written exactly like any buddy cop movie ever. Though you can still surpass this very formulaic approach if the characters still have interesting personalities, the performances are good, or the circumstances are different enough, but they manage to fail on all fronts. Everything plays out exactly how you would think. At one point, Roy even tells Proctor to not be a cliché. Is this supposed to be a joke in itself? Almost every character in this movie is a cliché!

There’s also no “B” story to think of, so if you’re not hooked immediately with the main story of Nick going after this ancient gold, you’re basically shit out of luck. Speaking of the gold, the whole thing was way too gimmicky. It didn’t really fit the rest of the story they were doing. Once the “Staff of Jericho” was introduced, it dawned on me something wasn’t clicking. Zombies using a super weapon didn’t seem necessary. It was way too much. There were too many ideas thrown into this story in all the wrong places. All of the wild ideas were thrown into the action and stuff involving the bad guys, when it should’ve been used on the world-building and character development. Having this little of depth to the narrative in such a big-budget film is just lazy. Though Jeff Bridges’s Roy is a particularly interesting character (though he’s ruined because of failed humor left and right), Ryan Reynolds wasn’t as good as he usually is in a comedy-focused film. R.I.P.D. is a movie that definitely could’ve benefitted from Reynolds playing himself because it would’ve injected a much-needed energy boost to the story. However, with the way things disappointingly play out, Reynolds plays the role relatively serious, with only a couple of jokes here and there and some yelling. Maybe this is because the film came out when Reynolds was going through his action phase, so he felt the need to not force any laughs. Regrettably, I have to say that if there was ever a time when he should’ve played up his sarcastic persona, this would’ve been the time to do it.

The Nick character seems more inconvenienced than anything throughout this whole movie. He doesn’t react how I feel someone actually would in the scenarios he finds himself in. When he initially dies and is sent into the room with Proctor, and she starts overloading him with all of this information about the R.I.P.D. (an otherworldly concept), he takes the info better than anyone in the entire world would! He plays it way too cool. An animated Reynolds freaking the fuck out would make sense here, considering the tone and general story of the movie. Also, Proctor implies that Nick was probably going to Hell until she brought him to the department, but the only thing he did remotely bad was steal gold from criminals. Is it just me, or is this really not that big of a deal? He also planned on giving it back anyway, so I just don’t buy that this was enough for Nick to be considered a bad person. There’s no way he was that worried about where he’s going to go because there’s literally nothing else said about Nick to make me think he’s deserving of an eternity in hell. If Proctor is lying to him to keep him as a member of the R.I.P.D., then she’s more deserving of burning in Hell than anyone! The stakes aren’t believable enough to me. If they made him do worse things, or he’s like a known corrupt cop that has done worse and he’s looking for redemption, you might have had something here. However, this Nick is way too nice.

Proctor didn’t explain nearly enough about the history of the department either, or really answered any deep questions we as an audience would have. As I stated in my summary, it is explained that so many people have managed to escape death because “the system” wasn’t designed to keep track of so many people dying. What the fuck does that even mean? Is there some sort of database? Unfortunately, it’s never touched on again. Why? This is a pretty important detail to give such a vague answer to. She was way too nonchalant about this whole situation. Again, it was to play up the humor about how this is everyday business for them but because of that, the story took another big hit. This premise is a foreign concept to us, so it has to be laid out pretty thoroughly to explain the lore and the years of history behind the Rest in Peace Department, how things got started, the day-to-day operations, eventful moments in the department’s history that defined who they are, etc.

They didn’t do any of this.

One thing they did get right was Julia and Nick’s relationship. They were a very attractive couple. Though we don’t see too much of them together, they do look very much in love in the scenes they’re in, or maybe it’s because I’m in love with Stéphanie Szostak and will give her credit regardless. It’s hard to say. I did love the purgatory scenes, where everything in real time is paused once a character dies in real life. Those sequences were very cool to watch unfold from an effects standpoint. Subsequently, the climax was very heartfelt. Going along with the positives, there were also two notable things I laughed it during the course of this movie, so though the movie isn’t very funny, it’s not completely devoid of humor. This of course was when a defiant Roy asked Proctor to name a cop better than him. Without question, she rattles off a list of people with one name even he agrees with (“Okay, he’s pretty good”). The other was Roy telling Nick about how after he died, a coyote skull-fucked him. However, Nick refuses to feel sorry for him. This got a decent chuckle from me.

The action sequences were at times visually impressive, but they were pretty illogical. For instance, at one point when Bobby and his group of bad guys unleash this weapon that puts everyone in the department in slow motion, so they can go steal the magic gold, Bobby has a perfect chance to kill Nick and doesn’t take it. He just leaves like he didn’t have enough time. Mind you, there was a group of people with him. Why didn’t they just go get the gold while Bobby killed Nick (which would’ve taken seconds since he was right next to him)? The second major example was during the big shootout at the end. Nick and Roy bust in and start shooting at the bad guys, and they are shot at by a minimum of five or six different people DIRECTLY in front of them. They also have no protection to speak of and initially, they don’t use anything for cover either. Despite this, EVERY SINGLE BAD GUY somehow happens to miss. I’ve seen some crazy action movies in my time where the bad guys miss miraculously, but this was egregious because the characters were all standing in front of each other with nothing blocking either side’s view. How could you not hit them? It would be almost impossible! They could’ve hit them blindfolded from that distance! Also, there’s only two fucking targets! Are you kidding?! One guy even runs all the way up to Nick to shoot him, while holding two guns, instead of shooting him from a few feet back. This idiotic decision leads this random bad guy to be shot by Roy. Why didn’t this guy shoot earlier? He was a couple of feet behind Nick! Why did this random deado have to jump directly in front of him to shoot him with two guns? Why would someone make this decision? Why couldn’t he just shoot him from a distance like everyone else was doing in that moment of time?

Are deados just really fucking stupid? If so, this needs to be established beforehand.

In addition, they completely botched the look of the “deados”. They should’ve been unforgettable, disgusting, vile creatures. They all should’ve had distinct looks with crazy-looking designs. They had the budget to do it. They could’ve used it to create some wild human/monster people to give us dastardly looking villains, but also so striking you can’t look away. They should’ve been something we want the good guys to decimate for the sake of humanity. Plus, it would help “up” the clear horror aspect of the story that could’ve made this movie much more visually interesting. Instead, they chose to make character designs either based on comedic decisions, or to give characters a generic zombie look. You couldn’t choose a more boring route to design your villains. The visuals could’ve saved some of the final product but besides those purgatory sequences, there wasn’t enough creativity to warrant this high of a budget.

Despite some (very few) positives, R.I.P.D. was still an extremely subpar action comedy. It’s a shame too because it had a lot of potential. There’s no reason why this movie couldn’t have been the start of a franchise. Everything was there to make it possible. The chosen cast was great, Kevin Bacon as the villain was good enough, and they had a huge budget backing a very inventive idea, with lots of room for future sequels because of the endless possibilities revolving around the premise. Clearly, the studio believed in this movie just as much as I did. The problem is that it still sucked. The action was average, the humor was below average, the characters were poorly written, the story was basic, the monsters weren’t scary or memorable in the very least, and the chemistry between our leads wasn’t what it needed to be.

Considering how much I love action comedies, buddy comedies, and sci-fi, R.I.P.D. might be one of the most substandard movies I’ve watched in a while.

Fun Fact: Zach Galifianakis was originally cast in Jeff Bridges’s role but had to drop out due to scheduling conflicts. Jodie Foster was originally considered for the role of Proctor too.