The story of Jorma Taccone’s Over Your Dead Body, written by Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney, is the story of a lot of relationships. Initially, the film is full of energy and hot-blooded passion, but then it settles into a familiar routine. What stars off as pleasurable, even exciting, begins to feel rote and monotonous, even abusive.
Dan (Jason Segel), an indie film director languishing in a job creating ads for YouTube, is married to a young actress, Lisa (Samara Weaving), who’s busting her ass to make it to the A-list. While it’s never specified what brought them together, it’s not hard to connect the dots that they met on set. This much is clear though: Lisa found out that the same neurotic qualities that made Dan a great director made him a control freak in his personal life.
At the start of Over Your Dead Body, we meet the unhappy couple at a hell of a breaking point. Dan, incapable of keeping up with the younger, smarter, and awfully sarcastic partner, takes Lisa on a weekend trip to an isolated cabin, with every intent of murdering her, and completely oblivious to the fact that she’s also planning to kill him.
For its first half, Over Your Dead Body walks a killer tightrope, using awkward comedy to accentuate every irritation that drove these two people to want to kill each other. When their murder blueprints are exposed, Dan and Lisa go completely knives out with barbs and hateful imitations of each other, even needling each other about the holes in their plans. Both leads are stellar, but Weaving—with a rare appearance from her actual, innately brash Australian accent—really goes for the jugular every time she opens her mouth.
The film, which at times suggests the harder-hearted War of the Roses remake that Jay Roach didn’t give us, goes in some very dark directions, and it’s both funny and scathing in its portrayal of a particular type of controlling man who’s in over his head. And then, during an especially violent struggle, Over Your Dead Body’s tension is diffused when it turns into a different film.
Turns out, as Dan and Lisa were making their way to their little hate nest, prison guard Allegra (Juliette Lewis) was heading in their direction, alongside her murderous boyfriend, Pete (Timothy Olyphant), and his lunkheaded friend, Todd (Keith Jardine), both of whom she broke out of prison. They decide to take shelter in the same cabin where Dan and Lisa are staying, and when an accident causes the runaways to crash through the ceiling, Over Your Dead Body becomes something akin to a trashy, ineffective Funny Games riff.
Lewis, Olyphant, and Jardine are nothing if not committed, and it’s exhilarating to see Lewis in Natural Born Killers mode again, but that’s also emblematic of how the film goes in the least interesting place imaginable. Mean but senseless, sadistic more than hilarious, Over Your Dead Body’s shift into gonzo home-invasion horror effectively turns the film into a tonal mismatch, and the way the script uses the invasion as an excuse for Dan and Lisa to start working as partners rings hollow given everything we know about them up to this point.
It certainly doesn’t help that Weaving and Segel get less of a chance to shine during this stretch, though Segel at least ensures that Dan makes a believable transition to someone traumatized into catatonia and numbness rather than terror. To be fair, these are all flaws inherent to Over Your Dead Body’s source material, Tommy Wirkola’s The Trip, but no one behind the camera here is doing much to fix that film’s problems, leaving the audience feeling like many a best friend who’s watched a toxic relationship completely fall apart in real time.
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