movie review
ETERNITY
Running time: 113 minutes. Rated PG-13 (sexual content and some strong language). In theaters.
Till death do us part? Apparently not.
The exhausting romantic comedy “Eternity” imagines what would happen if a recently deceased woman encountered both her first husband who died in the Korean War and her second husband of 67 years in the afterlife — and was forced to pick.
I, meanwhile, will nitpick.
Why must Limbo look like a 1968 insurance salesmen convention?
Elderly Larry (Miles Teller) keels over at a gender-reveal party and wakes up as his younger self in what appears to be a retro old Hilton.
There are booths advertising different potential eternities like timeshares. There’s Man Free World, Catholic World, World of Satanism and a version of Paris where people speak English in French accents. Several options have been discontinued because they’re no longer politically correct.
Is there an End Credits World?
Because this overstretched gag is a “Black Mirror” that could use some Windex.
He meets his A.C — afterlife coordinator, blech — Anna (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), who tells him he has a week to choose an infinite future.
It’s simplistic, uninsightful and mostly unfunny to reduce death to a cheeseball corporate presentation. Not to mention old-hat. “Beetlejuice” did it far better and more stylishly 37 years ago.
Larry’s wife Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) quickly follows him to the grave and arrives to find both him and Luke (Callum Turner), her hunky first spouse from when she was very young.
A spiritual love triangle commences and, really, the ethereal beyond is not noticeably different from earth. People go to bars. They take commuter trains. Time moves at the same pace. It’s all very bland, like a moving walkway at the airport.
Despite hating director and co-writer David Freyne’s sense of humor and lazy world building, the idea of running into all your past loves in heaven is a smart and lively one. When your mind wanders — and it often will! — you put yourself in the characters’ confused shoes.
And the three actors give strong and touching performances, especially Olsen and Teller, who have to be old and young at once without making it cartoonish or awkward. Teller, who often comes across as cocky onscreen, has a cozy world weariness here. He genuinely brings to mind your grandpa, even though he’s only 38.
Yet it’s Olsen’s emotional frailty that helps pump up a bad movie into a mediocre one.
I won’t spoil the ending, but there is nobody on the planet who wants to spend forever in the aw-shucks final destination this movie settles on.
There’s an eternity joke to be made here, but that’s too easy.
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