A man's fiancée dies in a tragic accident on the day of their wedding. He mourns her death for an entire year before contacting a psychic for help. He hopes to communicate with his lost fiancée through the help of the psychic's powers. But instead of contacting his dead partner, he falls for the psychic. This prompts the deceased fiancée to return from the dead so that she can nip this blossoming romance in the bud.
To the average moviegoer, this should sound like the premise for a truly campy horror flick, right? Or, at the very least, a dark comedy. Wrong. This plot summary describes "Over Her Dead Body," a light-hearted romp so blithe and bright-faced that it barely passes for entertainment.
Eva Longoria plays the dead fiancée, Kate. She's squished beneath an ice sculpture as she feverishly micromanages her and her soon-to-be husband Henry's (Paul Rudd) wedding. Henry laments his fiancée's death, never dating a single woman for the next year. In this grieving stage, he develops an ideal sense of subdued humor. He's tired and torn, unconcerned and apathetic. This sarcastic delivery, which Rudd produces with relative ease, trumps Longoria's approach.
She transposes her most well-known persona, a huffy homemaker from television's "Desperate Housewives," to the film's initial scenes and then immediately sets her acting to autopilot. Her lines fall flat, the humor in them nearly destroyed by the degree to which she conjures entitlement and impatience. Oh, and let's not forget that Longoria is an awful actress. "Over Her Dead Body" would have played out much better had it not featured her petite, suburban dad-pleasing body.
That Henry's next love is a warm and agreeable woman (Lake Bell) is something of a shock. How could a man who has so deeply loved a privileged and manipulative woman love another who's just the opposite? Well, he does, and the audience takes the curious change of pace in stride, just as they take the film's other curious choices in stride.
The characters, for instance, are played out as much less intelligent than any viewer would believe them to be. Longoria's character haunts Bell's with a limited set of ghoulish tricks, and these tricks are utilized on several occasions. One involves Longoria mimicking sounds with her mouth - first a gymnasium loudspeaker, then a doorbell and finally repeated farting noises.
Ignoring the fact that farting noises were funny up until one hit puberty, viewers must think that by the time Longoria is mimicking them, Bell has caught on. She knows the trick and is not fooled for a second. There's no way Rudd's character is actually farting with an intensity that might burn holes through his underwear. Again, the moviegoer is wrong, and the movie grows tiresome.
The moviegoer, however, would not be wrong to skip out on the stupidly executed storyline and the horribly conceived humor of "Over Her Dead Body," which - and this last bit of information really isn't important - opens in theaters everywhere tomorrow.
