Men in Black was the second highest grossing film of 1997, second to Titanic, the second highest grossing movie of all time. There were two sequels, each successful, with the last coming in 2012. I only mention this because by 2013, when Universal released R.I.P.D., a tentpole film that seemed so desperate to mimic Barry Sonnenfeld’s films that what could’ve been a unique idea becomes a patchwork of tired clichés. However, the biggest sin of R.I.P.D. is that it’s a much bigger film that it has to be. This is something that could’ve be a cool little supernatural detective story, but instead it’s a bloated feast of computer generated imagery on top of its deadening familiarity.
Ryan Reynolds plays Nick Walker, a Boston cop who stole some gold with his partner Bobby (Kevin Bacon). When we first see Nick, he’s digging a hole in his yard, burying some gold, and planting a tree over it, just like any normal individual. After having some pre-work sex with his wife Julia (Stephanie Szostak), Nick goes to work where he tells Bobby that he wants to be an honest cop from now on. During a violent raid on a drug compound, Bobby murders his partner to protect his own hide. Then Nick is sucked into the whirlwind to the afterlife where he’s greeted by Proctor (Mary Louise Parker). Since he was a crooked cop with an honest heart, Nick can work for the R.I.P.D. (Rest in Peace Department. Get it?) and round up souls that are evading judgment. Nick agrees because otherwise there’d be no movie. But since this is a buddy cop film, Nick is teamed with Roycephus Pulsipher, Jeff Bridges playing the old western lawman. In simpler terms, Nick is Will Smith, Roycephus is Tommy Lee Jones, and Mary Louise Parker is Rip Torn. All that’s missing is the Ryan Reynolds rap video.
Watching R.I.P.D., you don’t want to draw the obvious comparisons to Men in Black, but the film just won’t let you. A quicker synopsis could just as easily read:
A hotshot rookie and veteran officer of a secret supernatural police force have to learn how to work together in order to stop a threat that might destroy the world.
That’s it. Bland, clichéd, and pretty much a beat for beat unofficial sequel to Men in Black.
Frankly, it’s all a damn shame. Robert Schwentke isn’t a hack. But the combinations of his exaggerated angles and frantic camera movements and the cliché ridden premise make his efforts look like plagiarism. Jeff Bridges has claimed that film was a causality of studio interference, but with the film’s entire generic framing it’s hard to believe that this is a film that’d have much heart to begin with. Like so many blockbusters, it unnecessarily makes the stakes too great – the end of the world. But the end of the world scenario is the perfect metaphor for the compulsive gambler nature of studio executives. They bet their entire career on these projects and want the biggest possible payoff. If it doesn’t work, it’s the end of the world. But this isn’t a film that needed the fate of the world to hang in the balance, it could’ve reduced its scale and been a more compelling buddy cop flick. As it stands, R.I.P.D. is just bootleg copy of Men in Black, complete with bad Photoshop artwork and bad spelling on the cover.
It’s truly amazing how little with is employed in R.I.P.D. The gag about Jeff Bridges walking the Earth in the form of a sexy woman (Marisa Miller) and Ryan Reynolds as an old Asian man (James Hong), which was featured prominently in the trailers, is a one-note gag that is repeated throughout the film’s 90-odd-minute running time. The further extent of the humor is reaction shots of Ryan Reynolds to Jeff Bridges’ old-timey ways, silly puns about Eternal Affairs, and the biggest joke of all: Jeff Bridges is basically unintelligible.
R.I.P.D. is a cardboard cutout of a movie, a fleeting novelty you walk by once and immediately forget. I fear that so much of this piece is just redundant in its references to Men in Black, yet I’m just aping the actions of the film I’m critiquing. That’s one of the consequences of writing about a film that deals with the afterlife without saying anything about life and death, that isn’t concerned with the great unknown but the great familiar – you might just be bound to confines of the subject matter. I want R.I.P.D. to be something other than a cheap, yet incredibly expensive, Men in Black rip-off, but R.I.P.D. wants to be a Men in Black rip-off. It feels like by just writing about it, I put more thought into this film than those who assembled it. In the end, it’s rather fitting that R.I.P.D. deals with the dead, it never had any life to begin with.
