‘Over Your Dead Body’ Review: Jason Segel and Samara Weaving Thriller

Over Your Dead Body, the new film by director Jorma Taccone (MacGruber, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping) begins with its central couple already deep in crisis. Dan (Jason Segel), a once-promising indie director, and Lisa (Samara Weaving), a middling actress, can barely make it through a car ride without insulting each other’s careers, or sit down for a home-cooked meal without flinging accusations of infidelity or controlling behavior.

Divorce would be the obvious option, but divorce would do nothing to wipe out the crushing debt they’ve accumulated over their seven years of marriage. (Who’s to blame for that is yet another sore spot.) Instead, each decides separately and secretly, it’ll have to be murder. But when a trio of dangerous outsiders interrupt the deadly weekend getaway Dan and Lisa had planned, what should have been a game of marital cat and mouse turns into a deliciously gory, if overly protracted, battle for survival.

Over Your Dead Body has a pair of aces in Segel and Weaving. As much as Lisa and Dan might despise one another, it’s hard to watch them argue over who’s come up with the better killing plan — then who actually has the guts to pull it off, then who has the dramatic chops to play the innocent grieving spouse — without getting the sense that they deserve each other, for better and for worse. Even the fact that they’ve both come here intent on murder feels like proof of their strange compatibility: Surely only true soulmates could match each other’s freak to such a dark and deranged degree.

But as sickly enjoyable as it might have been to watch Dan and Lisa verbally and physically eviscerate each other for 98 minutes (“You were gonna cut me up? As if. You can’t even touch raw meat,” scoffs Lisa about the bonesaw Dan had purchased to dismember her body after the fact), Over Your Dead Body, a remake of Tommy Wirkola’s 2021 trip The Trip, has other ideas. The biggest wrench in their plans turn out to be Pete (Timothy Olyphant), Arabella (Juliette Lewis) and Todd (Keith Jardine) — escapees from a nearby prison who eventually have their own reasons for wanting Lisa and Dan dead. With their appearance, the film transforms from a bloodier spin on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to something like a home-invasion thriller.

A favorite trick of screenwriters Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney is dropping a big reveal, and then jumping back hours or days to show us how we got here; it’d be annoying if they didn’t do it with such gleeful panache, like a pair of expert gossips holding court at a cocktail party. As such, it actually comes as a slight disappointment when there are no more rugs left to be pulled out from under us, and Over Your Dead Body transitions into a relatively straightforward battle for survival.

But at least “straightforward,” in this case, still means packed with playful punches. Over Your Dead Body is not for the faint of heart, but give or take a rape threat that crosses the line into smug sadism without quite seeming to realize it, the violence lands as more comically cartoonish than horrific. The characters’ Looney Tunes-esque tolerance for punishment offers no shortage of opportunities for audiences to groan at the sight of faces getting blown off, yelp at seeing fingers getting sliced off, or giggle at a person’s back getting pierced with an entire knife block’s worth of blades; Taccone does not skimp on the bloody special effects. Among other things, there’s a mangled foot depicted in graphic enough detail to make a resident from The Pitt turn green.

If you look closely, there’s the shadow of a lesson here about how adversity can be a source of strength — one not so far removed from the complaints by Dan’s cantankerous father (Paul Guilfoyle) that the younger generations have grown too soft without a war to instill them with courage and strength. (It’s not Over Your Dead Body‘s fault that a new U.S. war has broken out since that line of dialogue was recorded, though it is its fault that Dan is old enough to have lived through the Iraq and Afghanistan wars already.) Sometimes, the movie suggests, it’s not until your back is to the wall that you realize what you’re truly willing to fight for.

But the moral is faint, overshadowed by the film’s much greater interest in watching people beat and stab and shoot the shit out of each other. Some couples, it seems, would rather fend off a band of deranged killer criminals together than go to marital therapy. And based on the way that Lisa and Dan start to see something worth saving in each other after all, sometimes it even works.