Thursday, Jan. 31, 08

A Dud Comedy

Over Her Dead Body just isn’t funny

By Dan Hudak

Eva Longoria Parker and Paul Rudd prepare for their wedding in Over Her Dead Body.

If there’s humor to be found in death, Over Her Dead Body doesn’t find it. This is an unfunny, downright nasty would-be comedy, a movie so creatively inept that it resorts to both extended fart jokes and riffing on gay stereotypes for laughs. The stench of failure is palpable and omnipresent, and the sun-soaked, television-quality production values don’t help either.

It’s a sad story, really: Control freak Kate (Eva Longoria Parker) dies after an ice sculpture accidentally falls on her the morning of her wedding, leaving her fiancé, Henry (Paul Rudd), and his sister, Chloe (Lindsay Sloane), devastated. One year later, Chloe convinces a moping Henry that he needs closure; her remedy is for him to see a psychic named Ashley (Lake Bell), whose real job is running a catering company with her gay partner, Dan (Jason Biggs).

Henry thinks she’s a fraud, and she is, but romance nonetheless ensues. Then Ashley (and only Ashley) starts seeing Kate’s ghost, who does what any almost-desperate housewife would do: torments Ashley into not dating Henry. Confusion and more broken hearts ensue, all leading to Kate, who’s been dead for a year, learning a great life lesson while the others get the relief of living without her bitchiness.

Writer/director Jeff Lowell’s premise is clever but inherently flawed. It’s like Ghost, only it’s trying to be funny, which is a mistake. Kate is so hyper-controlling the morning of her wedding that we instantly don’t like her, and our distaste only grows when she spitefully reappears to haunt Ashley. Shouldn’t she want Henry to find happiness? There’s nothing about Ashley that implies she can’t make Henry happy, so everything Kate does is out of selfish bitterness and is too negative for a romantic comedy.

Of course, all would be forgiven if the movie was funnier, but even the gifted Paul Rudd (Knocked Up) struggles to earn a laugh. Kate’s haunting of Ashley leads to a few decent bits, but most of the time you just feel bad for Ashley for having to put up with it. To her credit, Bell makes Ashley likable and sympathetic, but she’s too often the victim of Kate’s harassment to bring any of her own comic talents to the role.

As for Longoria Parker, she’s undone by material that makes her more annoying than funny. We need to like and feel sorry for Kate, and believe that she really thinks she’s protecting Henry. But we never like her, and never feel sorry enough for her to care. She’s a hateful shrew, and Longoria Parker, who proves her comic talents every week on Desperate Housewives, never had a chance.

Most of the laughs we do get come courtesy of Biggs, who has moments of inspired physical comedy as he stumbles around the kitchen, and Stephen Root (aka Milton from Office Space), whose snide remarks keep Kate on her toes.       

So let’s recap: death, spite, farts and gay stereotypes. It doesn’t sound funny — and it isn’t.