A lot of great romances are centered around death. Titanic wouldn’t have been the same if Leo hadn’t died. Neither would the classic tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. There’s just something about true love surviving even if one of the participants no longer has a pulse. Unfortunately, the new romantic comedy Over Her Dead Body doesn’t have that same effect.
Recently wed Eva Longoria Parker plays a woman who dies on her wedding day and comes back as a ghost to sabotage her former fiancé’s new relationship. But if you go to see this film, 15 minutes in you will wish someone had killed you before you sat down.
The film’s attempt, and ultimate, failure at romantic comedy mixes the supernatural with overt physical comedy. The result is a forced — and at times incoherent — plot with little to no substance and an entirely predictable outcome. On top of that, the acting in the film is horrible and over-the-top.
Paul Rudd (Clueless, Knocked Up) plays Longoria’s former fiancé Henry and brilliantly utilizes his bitingly sarcastic humor, dry wit and wonderful comedic timing, but even his performance is unable to save the film. Longoria’s character Kate is a bitchy, over possessive and self-involved antagonist — the only character Longoria is capable of playing. It doesn’t matter if she is a recently departed fiancé, a “Desperate” housewife, or just Eva — it’s always the same, and it always seems to come off flat. Lake Bell (most well known as the star of the short-lived TV drama “Surface”), who plays Ashley, a psychic caterer that Rudd visits to try and contact his departed fiancé, and who eventually becomes his new love interest, simply can’t act. Her emotions are fake, her comedic timing is off and her unbelievably orange fake-tan incredibly distracting.
Furthermore, the attempts made by Longoria’s character to play pranks on Ashley in an effort to keep her away from Henry, are at best not believable and quickly grow tiresome.
Writer and director Jeff Lowell, whose previous gig was writing for “The Drew Carey Show,” was obviously trying to put a new spin on the standard romantic comedy plot, but the added elements of a ghost and the many unrelated subplots just don’t manage to gel. Although Lowell’s writing does contain several laugh-out-loud moments, they mostly come from random moments of background action in the film and have nothing to do with the main actors or plot. The audience becomes more interested in these interactions, thereby missing a good portion of the main dialogue and getting lost within the story.
Jason Biggs, of American Pie fame, has a supporting role as Ashley’s friend and business partner Dan. But in the end, his character only serves to point out the flaws in the construction of the film. He barely interacts with any other character besides Ashley, and his role is entirely meaningless to the advancement of the story. Although he ultimitly provides several funny moments, they just distract from the already incoherent plot.
Of course the film has several good elements: Rudd and Biggs, several sly comedic moments, a good soundtrack and its reletivly short length.
The film feels more like three or four separate movies. If each of them were on their own, they might be manageable, but together the many plots and directions of the film become convoluted and implausible. Also, although the advertisements would like you to think otherwise, Eva Longoria Parker does not appear very often in the film, so any of you who were planning to see the movie just to see Eva — consider yourself warned.
Overall, if you take the film as a satire or campy farce, then you will probably be able to stomach it, but the sad thing is, it really is supposed to be serious. In the end Over Her Dead Body was dead before it even began.