Jason Segel, welcome back to the big screen! I missed seeing your wonderful comedic sensibilities in movie form, and was wondering if you still had it. Over Your Dead Body proves Segel can still be the man when he wants to be, but a little more seasoned than he was when he was Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Now he’s trying to murder Samara Weaving instead.
Dan (Segel) and Lisa (Samara Weaving) are heading to their New England lake getaway for the weekend. They should be excited, but Dan’s acting weird, openly stating repeatedly where he’s going and how he’s worried for Lisa taking a crazy dangerous hike. Plus he’s hiding strange items in the trunk, and being overly sentimental cooking steaks with peppercorn imported from Ohio (heh). As Ben is about to, um, “exectue” his master plan, he wakes up groggy…and tied up by Lisa, who sees through this facade how she was not going to return from this trip.
Over Your Dead Body feels a little bit like a generation pass at times. We know Jason Segel can do this type of role, and he’s good as ever here, passive aggressively trying to bring Lisa to his point of view and failing miserably. What I didn’t know was if Samara Weaving could do a more chatty version of her Ready or Not character. Turns out she just needed a good script to do it. Weaving snipes just as funnily as Segel does, throwing awkward “wine o’clock” aphorisms out, or instantly calling out Dan on his poor decision making. They diffuse what could have been a very tense film into a very dark comedy; the morning where they confront each other is comedy gold, with each trying to one up the other in why their plan is better than the others, and why their partner is the reason the marriage failed, not them, topped off by their acted confessionals in front of the cops, this movie’s version of a dance off.
And then the twists start coming. Jorma Taccone does a good job introducing a new one every 20 minutes, revealing a little more of what’s going on. And as those twists start to die down with about half an hour left, time to start grossly murdering people! There’s a few random characters who get got in crazy ways, but thanks to Taccone and the actors, they make those “collateral damage” characters have some sort of fun weird little short film before a lawn mower takes out their throat. Timothy Olyphant and Juliette Lewis (especially) have fun letting loose and untethering their presence from any sort of human reality, particularly Lewis’s unhinged Old School character going through Florence Nightingale syndrome.
I don’t think you’re going to learn anything from Over Your Dead Body. But you are going to laugh a lot. Sometime uncomfortably, sometimes cackling, sometime surprisingly so, but always a laugh. Thanks to Jorma Taccone and his committed cast, particularly Segel, always willing to make himself the punch line, just in this case metaphorically and physically.