★★½ (2½ out of 4)
Murder can be quite the leveler in marital relationships, especially when both parties want to kill each other. Remember the movie “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie or the streaming version with Donald Glover and Maya Erskine? Throw that in with a legit reboot of the Norwegian action-comedy “The Trip” and that’s “Over Your Dead Body.” Now in theaters, the movie is total tonal chaos, a mix of giggles and gore that doesn’t always mesh. No matter. The director is Lonely Island nutjob Jorma Taccone (“MacGruber,” “Popstar”) who cares only about the bloody fun of it. Follow his lead, focus on the joke parts and you’ll be good for throwaway escapism, dished out by a frisky cast.
Working from a script by Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney, “Over Your Dead Body” stars “Shrinking” standout Jason Segel and Aussie scream queen Samara Weaving who recently scared us senseless in “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come.” Weaving just gave birth to her first child, a baby girl, with her director husband Jimmy Warden, but like her friend and lookalike Margot Robbie, she likes taking risky roles, no matter how socially unacceptable.
Jason Segel and Samara Weaving get laughs, but their murder comedy is total tonal chaos.
Weaving plays Lisa, a struggling theater actress married to Dan (Segel), a director who’s not fulfilling his early promise. Yikes, he’s shooting those irritating pop-up ads. And he might be shooting Lisa as well if he gets his way on a weekend trip they plan to a remote lake cabin in upstate New York owned by his gung-ho dad, Michael (Paul Guilfoyle).
These two keep pushing each other’s nerves. He accuses her of cheating and hates her Aussie accent—“It’s like British crossed with the devil”—and she hates discovering his plan to tie her up and sink her to the bottom of the lake. No one explains why divorce isn’t a more workable solution than homicide. It’s a blood feud thing.
Dan starts with chloroform, not expecting Lisa to taze him into unconsciousness. The game is on. And for a while the dialogue actually gives the actors something to act. And just when things are getting “War of the Roses” tasty, the script throws in a new wrinkle: three new characters to raise the stakes. Two of them, Pete (Timothy Olyphant) and Todd (Keith Jardine), are escaped convicts. The third is Allegra (Juliette Lewis), the prison guard who helped them break out.
All this is basically an excuse to bring Dan and Lisa together as allies against for-real dangerous people. It’s always great to see Olyphant—“Justified” still holds a place in my pleasure memory—and his villainy is as delicious as it is scary. In prison, the threesome enjoyed playing rape games. And it’s here that “Over Your Dead Body” start losing its grip, falling into a darkness that overwhelms its dithering charm.
This is no knock on Segel and Weaving, who keep tilting the balance toward laughs, where it rests most comfortably. The scene in which Dan and Lisa rehearse what they’ll say to the police when the other’s body is discovered is uproarious in its dazzling deceit. As Pete points out, “In a relationship you need to find ways to keep things fresh.” Segel and Weaving work their magic to do just that in “Over Your Dead Body.” What a shame they end up fighting a losing battle with the script.