'Over Your Dead Body' Is Gleefully, Violently Fun

I had incredibly high hopes for Jorma Taccone’s Over Your Dead Body based on the director, the cast (Samara Weaving, Jason Segel, Timothy Olyphant, Juliette Lewis), and the trailer. Then the movie came out, the reviews were mixed, and it mostly vanished without much notice.

But that’s also the MO of Taccone (MacGruber, Hot Rod, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping) — he makes bombs that find their audiences on streaming. I suspect Over Her Dead Body — a remake of Tommy Wirkola’s Norwegian film, The Trip — will eventually do the same. It’s not a great movie, but it is a genuinely fun one, and precisely the kind of frivolous, gratuitously bloody, and gleefully stupid comedy built for the streaming age. What might have felt like a slight disappointment in theaters actually makes for a perfect couch movie on a lazy weekend.

Samara Weaving plays Lisa. Jason Segel plays Dan. They’re married. They’re broke. They despise each other. They plan a weekend trip to Dan’s father’s cabin (Paul Guilfoyle) to reconnect, but — unbeknownst to each other — they’ve both hatched plans to murder the other and stage it as an accident. Those plans are promptly foiled when Pete (Olyphant), Todd (Keith Jardine), and Allegra (Juliette Lewis) escape from prison and use the same cabin as a hideout. What starts as a domestic thriller pivots, fairly gleefully, into a comedy bloodbath.

The film has an old-school sensibility — a callback to the dark comedies of the late ’90s and early 2000s, something in the vein of Very Bad Things. Segel and Weaving are hilariously awful to each other in ways that make you fully understand why both of them want the other dead, and just when that particular well starts to run dry, Olyphant arrives and elevates everything around him, as Olyphant tends to do. The film is considerably more gruesome and violent than you might expect, but it’s the right kind of gruesome — comic violence in service of the joke rather than in spite of it.

There’s not a lot of substance here. It’s not particularly subversive or original (the destination is never in doubt), and it doesn’t come close to the comic highs of Popstar. But it is a good, bloody, unpretentious good time — and it’s probably going to do gangbusters once it lands for free on Amazon Prime. It’s currently on VOD, but I’d give it a few weeks, tops.