For my 2018 Resolution Project, I decided to take a page out of Lane’s book and do my own Silver Screen Resolution (hence the Take Two part of the title). There are a lot of movies out there I haven’t seen but feel like I should have, or movies that I’ve simply wanted to see and have yet to get around to it. With a deadline of some kind, now I’ll have to finally make a point to find them, get them, and watch them. My rules for the resolution are slightly different in that:
- They must be spec-fic (this has not changed).
- The movie will not be one that is in theaters or that would be part of a Sound Off!
- They don’t have to be popular – or even something folks have heard about.
But I’ve decided to take my resolution to the next level as well, since I had more than 12 movies on my list that I wanted to see. And since we’re in “Take Two” mode, I might as well up the ante: I will instead be seeing two spec fic movies per month rather than just one. It may be a little early for Halloween, but why not get ghosty a little early and kick off this month’s pair with R.I.P.D.
Mild spoilers below.
This is one of those movies that I remember seeing the trailer for, and I recall thinking, “I don’t think that’s going to be a good movie.” Yet at the same time, I figured it would fall under my umbrella of Dumb But Fun. It wouldn’t be good per se, but it would provide me with mindless entertainment.
Nick (Ryan Reynolds) is a cop who may or may not have taken some gold from a bust that he and his partner Hayes (Kevin Bacon) did.
Okay. He totally took the gold. But his conscience and love of his wife got to him and he decided to turn it in. This doesn’t go over well with Hayes and in a move we all saw coming a mile away, he kills Nick. Nick then finds himself sitting in a small room with a strange woman opposite him. With his cop skills, he has a choice: Go down in Judgment as a dirty cop (I guess his last-minute repentance and love don’t count? Okay.), or work for the Rest In Peace Department for 100 years and then move on. Of course he agrees. The R.I.P.D. takes down what they call Deados (really? That’s the name you gave them?), people who have escaped Judgment or Hell to stay on Earth. If they stay there, their soul rots and it affects everything around them — dead plants, broken stuff, etc. It’s the R.I.P.D.’s job to bring them back. Simple enough until they stumble on some gold pieces that look oddly familiar to the ones that Nick and his partner stole…
Oh boy. Where to start. The vast bulk of this movie is tropes we’ve seen a million times over. As in, if tropes were water in a pitcher and the movie were a cup, then our cup runneth over. We’ve got the cop who loves his wife and wants to try and get back to her. We’ve got the dirty partner who may or may not be trying to hook up with said wife. We’ve got the asshole partner Roy (Jeff Bridges) who’s completely insensitive to the fact that Nick has just died and knows next to nothing about his new life. We’ve got the people who run this whole dead universe place who also do a really shitty job of giving Nick any useful information about the job. We’ve got — okay, you know what? Just think of it as Men In Black, only if Tommy Lee Jones was more of a jerk, the aliens are monstrous dead folk, and the universe we’re thrown into has WAY less explanation.
Welcome to your new job where we won’t tell you anything.
The amount of tropes and the lack of explanation for so many things are my biggest problems with this movie. I’m even kind of willing to get over the first issue because the story is, after all, basic and predictable. You know — we have to stop the bad dead people from destroying the world with this golden artifact, but we need to work together first and the people in charge don’t agree with our wild cop antics, blah blah blah.
However, there’s a massive world of death right behind the living one that has a lot of really strange things that don’t get, well, any explanations. I’m willing to suspend my disbelief for a lot of stuff, but if you’re going to present me with a universe, then I’d like to understand some of the rules that govern it. As the movie progressed, my line of questions just kept piling up.
- Indian food and spices like cumin will make a deado pop — that is, turn from looking human into their inner, rotting self. Why? No one knows. No, really, they say right in the movie that they don’t know.
- We’re given the rule that deados will make things rot and fall apart around them. Yet Roy still somehow has an informant deado that he lets stay on Earth — in a baseball stadium, no less. And yet nothing around him is rotting? And the longer they stay, the worse they get, but this guy seemed okay. This very concept breaks the whole reason the R.I.P.D. exists in the first place.
- Are…are they using six-shooters?
- Roy and Nick, to my knowledge, can only die via the same bullets they shoot at deados’ heads (and it has to be the head. Why? Again, who knows?). So when they fall out a building, Nick still yells that it hurts, which makes zero sense because they are dead. Likewise during a car chase, Roy announces that it scared the hell out of him. Why? YOU’RE ALREADY DEAD.
- If you’re dead and you stay on Earth, you’ll eventually turn into a deado — but apparently deados can still affect the real world around them. They can break things, hold things, and one of them even lived in an apartment. They’re supposed to be souls, but the only thing that changes is that they and the things around them rot — so aside from that they’re almost alive. Why are they even able to interact with the world in this way?
- When on Earth, Nick and Roy take on avatars; Nick is an old man (James Hong) and Roy is a very attractive woman (Marisa Miller). Makes some sense since Nick is freshly dead and Roy is a literal cowboy. But why do deados see them in their avatar forms rather than their real selves? Is that just on Earth to so deados don’t recognize them as R.I.P.D.? Yet it appears as though deados see them as their regular selves in the world of the dead. I just don’t fully understand the line drawn here or the reasons for it.
- Apparently here in 2018 we have modern technology, but the powers that be upstairs don’t use phones or email or anything, but instead a giant pneumatic tube system to send down messages printed out on paper. *sigh*
- Along those same lines, there’s a lot of filing and paperwork, a lot of pipes and a giant mechanical safe, which again seems weird and dumb for the afterlife. I guess it’s kind of like Beetlejuice only less uber-bizarre and far more organized (and well lit).
This is just a small list of questions and issues I have with this movie. Others include things like the gold artifact itself and who the hell made it (although to be fair, Roy does a good job at getting pissed about that and asking the same questions, but of course doesn’t get any answers), if the powers that be are able to give Nick and Roy avatars for living people to see, why can’t they make deados invisible or something similar? Are people’s deaths something that is set or do they die whenever? Because man a lot of people died when the artifact was activated and then a deado ran amok in the city. How is it even possible that Roy and Nick are the only ones to ever mess up and let a deado run loose? Deados don’t want to leave Earth, therefore I would assume most of them would run, and run fast and hard since they can leap out of buildings like the Hulk and still be fine. I fail to believe they’re the first/only to have this happen. And as usual, the powers that be suck because apparently they can’t do jack to stop the artifact. Frankly, they make a lot of shitty decisions for being…whatever they are. Why are these sort of celestial beings always in charge when they suck at everything?
Six-shooters…sort of? Two triggers? I’ll stop asking now…
Let’s take a moment to talk about the CGI. Dear Hollywood — please ease up on the use of CGI. I realize practical effects are more time consuming, but they look infinitely better. CGI is easy to spot and, when done poorly, looks tremendously fake. The monsters in here are designed well — their execution however, not so much. The burned girl deado could have easily had some makeup utilized on her face. But instead they CGI’d not just deado’s faces, but their entire bodies. For some, yes, it’s kind of required, but for others, not so much. Even Nick’s death was as CGI as it could have been. His body looked like CGI rubber rather than an actual human falling to his death. Cripes, guys, get a dummy that looks like him for all I care. A lot of this CGI was bad, and you should feel bad. Heck, give me back Gods of Egypt. That had a few moments, but it was definitely better than most of this movie.
All that aside, the movie did make me laugh a few times. Ryan Reynolds just has it in him to make me giggle, and the pairing of him and Jeff Bridges was interesting. Although to be honest, Jeff Bridges was hard to understand sometimes because he sounds like he’s speaking with a mouthful of gravel. I don’t know if that was for his gruff cowboy persona (calling back to True Grit) or if he just sounds like that these days. I like seeing Kevin Bacon as a bad guy (is it just me, or has he decided that after years of being good he’s done and wants to be in charge of some destruction?), and I may have teared up a bit at the ending. What can I say? A sad, in-love Ryan Reynolds will do that to me.
The absolute best part of this movie is James Hong. He is what people see when Nick strolls amongst the living, and when Nick pulls out his gun, people see an elderly Asian man brandishing a banana. Tell me James Hong running around with a banana isn’t funny. Honestly, I wanted more of James on the screen.
More James Hong please!
I know, maybe I shouldn’t be questioning a movie like this so much and just kick back an enjoy it. There are plenty of movies I can do that with, and they’re just as absurd, if not more so, than this one. Yet when so many things in the movie contradict themselves or just make zero sense, I can’t help it. After all, a movie can be absurd yet still uphold its own rules.
Watch it if you want. It’s the popcorn sort that, even with all its flaws, didn’t make me feel like I’d wasted a hour and a half. It is also based on a comic, so maybe go with that if you’d like. Maybe it has the answers I’ve been wondering about.
Images courtesy IMDB.com
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