Review of R.I.P.D.

Starring:

Ryan Reynolds

Jeff Bridges

Kevin Bacon

Mary-Louise Parker

Rated PG-13

Running time: 96 minutes

In a universe overseen by a distant and overburdened God, nightmarish pieces of crap that should be long dead occasionally sneak back to Earth in disguise, at which point they pollute everything with their negative, life-draining auras.  This is where movies like R.I.P.D. come from.

R.I.P.D. is quite possibly the single laziest and most unimaginative movie I have ever seen in my life. I once saw an episode of Curious George in which the monkey attempted to make a smoothie, only he didn’t remember the ingredients so he just threw together random things that felt right to him, like ketchup and six-month-old ear wax. And that is exactly what watching R.I.P.D. feels like: the sensation of seeing a hyperactive chimpanzee down a diarrhea-flavored smoothie and then slowly choke to death on his own vomit.

It was so simple, thought the producers of this film: Men In Black meets Ghost. What could go wrong? Certainly not casting Ryan Reynolds, he has such a solid pedigree when it comes to action blockbusters: Blade III, X-men Origins: Wolverine, Green Lantern…oh. Whoops. Ok, well what about Jeff Bridges?  Unfortunately, this movie could not afford the real Mr. Bridges, and so they replaced him with a badly-damaged robot replica that could only spout awful one-liners about coyotes.

Seriously, I recommend that anyone unfortunate enough to see this film tell themselves that it is not actually academy-award winning actor Jeff Bridges on screen, it’s some poor android who’s suddenly had his entire system downgraded to Windows 98.  Marie-Louise Parker and Kevin Bacon give similarly awful performances. Dear producers of this film:  If your big apocalyptic villain is Kevin Bacon, give him superpowers, or an interesting backstory, or something to make that make sense. As best I could figure, he was just the kid from Footloose all grown up and looking to give the universe the finger.  

You’ve seen the plot of this film in other better movies. A magical item threatens to open a dimensional portal, and only our heroes can stop it. Nothing is exciting or new about the way it is told here. The biggest sin is the cartoony design of the bad guys or “deados.” They are neither frightening nor funny.  They aren’t even disgusting or bizarre in any kind of fun way, they are just extremely annoying.

This film has one funny joke: the two main characters look like a hot blonde and an old Asian guy to all witnesses. You saw that joke in the trailers, so I now counsel you to avoid this film at all cost. It is only a matter of time before it gets sucked back down into Hell where it belongs, and I’d hate for anyone to be caught in the vacuum when that happens.