Cool Trailer, R.I.P.D. – But Do We Really Need Another Supernatural Buddy Cop Comedy?
The action looks fun, the monsters look suitably weird, and they've nailed the casting. But we've already seen Men In Black.
There is not a film in existence that couldn’t be improved by casting Jeff Bridges. Can you imagine if he’d, say, replaced Ken Jeong in The Hangover? Or Michael Fassbender in Prometheus? Or if he hadn’t been in the Tron remake? (Ugh.) Think of what a different world we might live in!
Now, imagine if he’d been tapped instead to play K in Men In Black. Yeah, this is what that would have looked like:
With the always-charming, sometimes-smarming Ryan Reynolds in the Will Smith role (without the Urban Attitude) and Jeff Bridges apparently wandering straight over from the True Grit wrap party, and Mary Louise Parker doing who even cares what because she should be in everything, R.I.P.D. (which really, really doesn’t need to explain the joke in the subtitle there) looks quite promising. The action looks fun, the ghosts/dead things suitably weird — the many-eyed guy gives Bridges the perfect opening for a classic I’m-going-to-kill-you-now one-liner — and it doesn’t look like anyone’s taking it too seriously.
Ghostbusters set the standard for the wisecracking supernatural buddy comedy nearly 30 years ago — one-liners, cool weapons, dudes unperturbedly mowing down unimaginable hellbeasts like they’re trimming hedgerows — and there’s really no need to mess with that formula as long as you get the casting right, and nail the casting and the SFX. (A recent exception was the regular-dudes-fighting-aliens flop The Watch. It had a fun ensemble, a sly script by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg and decent CGI beasts, but was about as cohesive as a raw quiche.)
I didn’t actually pick up the blindingly, staggeringly obvious MIB similarities on my first watch, though. Firstly because I’m slow like that, and secondly because my thoughts went immediately to the much, much weirder supernatural buddy horror-comedy, John Dies At The End. The spectacularly bonkers novel by Cracked.com editor Jason Pargin (under the pseudonym David Wong, also the main character) is the funniest book I read last year (NB: it was published online from 2001; I’m just slow like that). While it eventually spirals off into eighteen different universes of bizarre shit, the introductory premise is of two friends who have acquired a sort of hotline to different supernatural planes, and use these powers to ride around shutting down malevolent manifestations. One of them is a being who builds himself a body out of a whole deer’s worth of venison cuts in a freezer.
The trailer above is for the film version, which was released in January in the US, but doesn’t look like it’s going to make it to Australian screens. It was directed by possibly the only person (apart from maybe Edgar Wright) who could do its gleeful commitment to the grotesque justice: Don Coscarelli, director of Bubba Ho-Tep and Phantasm. So if you like the look of R.I.P.D. but wish there was some more viscerally horrifying representations of how it might look if the world of the dead and the evil starting seeping into ours rather than just big dudes crushing taxicabs, maybe that’s more your speed.
In the meantime, check out this extra trailer for R.I.P.D.: