The best way to sneak a comedy into theaters these days, it seems, is to make it a crime drama. Over Your Dead Body is billed as the latest effort from the director Jorma Taccone—a surprising name to be attached, considering his filmography. His previous features are Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and MacGruber, two of the better comedies released in the 2010s (back when such things still regularly appeared in cinemas). But that résumé sits somewhat uncomfortably against a poster with five stone-faced actors wielding guns and knives—announcing a rather grim-looking thriller in which blood will be shed and tough life lessons learned. What a riot.
Taccone’s film is certainly much more serious than the spoofy, anarchic projects he’s made in the past, including his work as a writer on Saturday Night Live. But it’s still, at its core, an attempt at a riotous black comedy, one indebted to obvious masters of the form such as the Coen brothers and the more horror-adjacent auteur Sam Raimi. Over Your Dead Body is a remake of the 2021 Norwegian film The Trip, and Taccone is doing his best to maintain its transgressive Nordic roots by mixing sex, gore, and deep marital discord with carefree aplomb. The movie is bleak, but it’s brazen enough to sometimes recall Taccone’s earlier, punchier work. With films of that ilk now a dying breed, even just bringing them to mind is perhaps the most that fans of his humor can hope for.
Over Your Dead Body follows a married couple whose relationship is beyond shipwrecked. Dan (played by Jason Segel) is a once-promising filmmaker reaching the tail end of his career; Lisa (Samara Weaving), his wife, is an actor and his former collaborator. They can’t stand each other. They journey to a cabin for an ostensible getaway, but the script, by Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney, makes clear almost immediately that the pair have designs beyond relaxation: They are both planning to murder the other, and have dueling elaborate schemes—chloroform, tasers, and staged hunting accidents are involved—to cover up the crime and embark on a new, liberated life after pocketing some insurance money.
[Read: SNL’s new kings of bizarro buddy comedy]
The pulpy setup befits a paperback crime thriller but is infused with some self-aware marital satire. Quickly, the plot leans into more cartoonish violence; as Dan and Lisa try to execute their deathly plans, a group of escaped convicts also coincidentally makes it to this lakeside home, led by a different, wildly horny couple, Pete (Timothy Olyphant) and Allegra (Juliette Lewis). This twist turns a portrait of a doomed marriage into a more madcap action comedy, including Mexican standoffs and bloody lawn-mower violence, letting Taccone show a real flair for creative camerawork. (The film is also sprinkled with more expected bits of pop-culture commentary—this is a story about a filmmaker and an actor, after all.)
Although not entirely successful, Over Your Dead Body is often diverting and bold. And it has an interesting avatar in Segel for the kind of work it represents: He established himself as a reliable figure in delightful TV fare such as the great Freaks and Geeks and the long-running sitcom How I Met Your Mother; he’s now one of his generation’s rare comedic leading men, making beloved hits (Forgetting Sarah Marshall; I Love You, Man) alongside unmemorable moneymakers (The Five-Year Engagement, Sex Tape). But Hollywood has moved away from positioning silly comedies for grown-ups as major events, and Segel has thus drifted back to TV—this is his first movie in four years, and his first big theatrical release since before the pandemic. His role reads almost like a haunted take on what’s been lost on-screen along the way, as Dan mourns (and Lisa openly mocks) his once-promising trajectory in the industry.
Taccone, similarly, clearly has the talent to make all kinds of interesting comedic movies, but seems in search of the best outlet. A member of the comedy-and-music troupe the Lonely Island, he was a creative force on Saturday Night Live for years, but hasn’t directed a film since making Popstar with his Lonely Island collaborators, Akiva Schaffer and Andy Samberg, 10 years ago. That movie was an instant cult classic, a terrific spoof of modern-day music celebrity that was well received by critics. But it was a surprising box-office bomb, perhaps an arbiter of Hollywood’s ongoing inability to get big comedies across to audiences in recent years.
[Read: Long live the delightfully dumb comedy]
But the goofier parts of Over Your Dead Body offer some hope for the future. The success of more straightforward spoofs such as Schaffer’s The Naked Gun last year is also reassuring; that film was a classic joke-a-minute throwback that largely worked (for both viewers and critics), more in line with the sort of fare that the Lonely Island made early on. The inherent nastiness of Over Your Dead Body will likely keep it from being anything but another cultish object in Taccone’s interesting career. But its highest highs come from slipping good old-fashioned physical farce into an action-heavy package—and wringing Looney Tunes–esque laughs along the way.
The post Even Hollywood’s Funniest People Have to Compromise appeared first on The Atlantic.
