The Lawless, Lackluster Limbo

R.I.P.D.
Directed by Robert Schwentke
One and One Half Stars

By Rollan Schott

Apparently in an effort to cash in on the “Men in Black” trend while it’s still fresh, Robert Schwentke’s “R.I.P.D.” employs the same lawless universe afforded to an irresponsible filmmaker making a film about the supernatural. “R.I.P.D” plays a bit like a Terry Gilliam film without the wit. Everything is thrown at the wall. No opportunity for the outlandish or the quirky is left on the table, usually at the expense of continuity or restraint. When I am told that deceased police officers acting as purgatorial gateway gunslingers must navigate the world of the living not as invisible phantoms but as randomly assigned avatars like bodacious supermodels or crotchety old Chinese men, I begin to suspect that the office in charge of rejecting bad ideas had sat empty for a day or two. Or eight.

Schwentke’s irreverent whimsy is so prescient it’s almost the theme. In his farcical impression of the sci-fi action buddy cop movie, the condemned dead who escape judgment as fugitives hiding in the world of the living find that their souls decay as long as they remain in the physical realm. Their decay manifests itself as deformities that mirror the sins for which they are condemned, including a man with ginger mutton chops who balloons to perhaps a thousand pounds and tears through the streets of downtown Boston, like a wrecking ball composed of Jell-O. Apparently gluttony is still an eternal offense. Now say what you will, but that’s perhaps the only time in the film an sensible explanation is provided. No one can exactly say why Dead-O’s, as they’re called, disguised as regular humans, are unmasked by the smell of Thai food, or why the gateway between the worlds of the dead and the living is the cramped toilet of a VCR repair shop, or how it might be considered conspicuous to disguise an R.I.P.D. officer, a lawman of limbo assigned to collect fugitives from judgment, as a pre-teen, freckled girl with pigtails and a dental headgear apparatus. The things that burden me at night.

Ryan Reynolds plays a young hot shot cop named Nick who pockets some surprise valuable evidence with his friend Hayes (Kevin Bacon), a chunk of cryptically engraved, mysterious gold. Nick is a newlywed. He wants to provide for his wife (Stephanie Szostak), but the guilt burdens him. He backs out. When Hayes kills him for his betrayal, Nick finds himself before a proctor (Mary-Louise Parker, a bright spot) in the afterlife, who lays it out for him. Nick pocketed evidence. He is a thief. He is a liar. He may not fair well at his judgment. But, the R.I.P.D. is on the lookout for good cops, who are apparently afforded an opportunity other professions do not enjoy in the next world. If he signs on for a hundred year tour in the force, he’ll have a considerable good deed to hang his hat on at the Pearly Gates. It may not be enough, but it can’t hurt.

Nick is partnered with Roy (Jeff Bridges), a lawman from the Old West who’d just as soon go it alone. There is a great deal of bickering as the two express their general disdain for one another. Who’d have guessed they’d be an odd couple. But then Nick stumbles upon a conspiracy to unearth and convene a series of golden artifacts that, assembled, would reverse the flow of the dead toward the afterlife, and flood the living world with condemned souls. His buried evidence is among the coveted pieces. Why, Roy would like to know, would such an artifact be made in the first place? Who knows. Characters in this film spend a great deal of time lamenting the bewildering redundancy of their own world.

“R.I.P.D.” is, not unlike the vastly superior “Pacific Rim”, in large part an appeal to the boom of video game culture in America. R.I.P.D. officers are nearly impervious to permanent damage. They exist largely in a world without consequence, a simulated universe where the fantastical may be employed, explored, and otherwise fired upon with eccentric weaponry, in effect, vicariously. Schwentke pauses three or four times for an elegantly composed, singular, memorable image: Roy, along the pier in Boston harbor, playing his old accordion softly, the silhouette of the men in an empty street, in the corner of the frame, the vastness of the Boston twilight looming over them. But nothing could have kept this vehicle afloat. To call it ‘dead weight’ would be the kind of tired, clichéd pun this material deserves.