In the new movie Over Your Dead Body, Jason Segel wants out. His character, Dan, feels trapped in a seemingly loveless marriage to Lisa (Samara Weaving), and in the early scenes it becomes clear that he’s clumsily constructing an escape plan. On a weekend getaway at his family’s upstate cabin, he will chloroform Lisa, murder her, sink her body in the nearby lake, and claim she went on a dangerous hike from which she never returned. The first big twist, revealed in the movie’s trailer, is that Lisa has been plotting something very similar for Dan. They’re both frustrated and highly irritated by the other ruining and disparaging of their respective murder plans; that’s something else they discover they have in common after years of drifting apart.
The movie feels like both a twisted extension of Segel’s creative interests and an expression of frustration at where they’ve sometimes led. Among the Judd Apatow-discovered Freaks and Geeks boys, most prominently fellow “freaks” Seth Rogen and James Franco, Segel seems the most genuinely interested in both the comedic and dramatic potential of more or less everyday relationship foibles. Rogen has plenty of relatable domestic antics, too, but they’re often framed as part of a story about growing up incrementally, whether accepting fatherhood in Knocked Up or navigating work, love, and friendship on the TV show Platonic.
As much as Segel has played in that world of man-children, many of his signature characters are defined by their willingness to commit with a fumbling devotion that sets him apart from his more overtly wisecracking peers. Going back to Freaks and Geeks, he has a slapstick vulnerability that makes him quite winning. He progressed nicely from that first-love bumbling: Forgetting Sarah Marshall is about a devastating break-up (which naturally turns out to be for the best). The Five-Year Engagement is one of the few Apatow-era comedies to concern itself with what happens after a firm romantic commitment, rather than treating it as a hard-won endgame. Even Sex Tape, the broad comedy that seemed to obliterate his interest in making other broad comedies, follows that progression; it’s about an ultimately sweet-natured attempt to revitalize a happy but complacent marriage.
It’s that puppyish eagerness to commit to relationships, romantic or otherwise, that made Segel such a great casting choice for the role of a devoted boyfriend/husband/bro on the sitcom How I Met Your Mother – which also seemed to eventually become, to him, a sentence to, if not prison, something like a work camp. He was vocal about his weariness with the grind of performing on a nine-year sitcom when he had designs to make his own movies – and to be fair to what some would probably describe as a lack of gratitude, How I Met Your Mother did pretty demonstrably go on for two seasons too long. No wonder, then, that he spent most of the time between that series and his lead role in Shrinking doing more dramatic work like The End of the Tour and Our Friend – material that capitalized on his slacker-ish goofball image with a more pervasive sense of tragedy hanging in the air. Over Your Dead Body is his first starring role in a broad comedy in over a decade. With the success of Shrinking, it seems almost as if, following years of thinking of How I Met Your Mother as a dayjob, he’s found what he used to seek in movies on his TV show.
Though Segel didn’t have a hand in writing it, the new movie does fit neatly into his cinematic domestic progression; it’s sort of a dark side to Sex Tape, where he and Cameron Diaz attempt to spice up their lives through some ill-fated homemade porno. Here, his character is married to a decade-younger woman, they’re both frustrated in their careers (his as a director, mostly of commercials after his indie movie flopped; hers as a mostly unsuccessful actress), and spicing things up is out of the question. Dan looks tired, especially compared to Segel’s more empathetic and enthusiastic (even in his neuroses) Shrinking character; he’s as bummed-out as it seems possible to be whilst also married to Samara Weaving.
Over Your Dead Body has a great structural gimmick for unveiling its various comic plot twists: It repeatedly jumps backward in time to fill in details that were previously obscured or only hinted at. (Characters played by Timothy Olyphant and Juliette Lewis eventually join the picture with this device’s help.) The running gag/strategy feels like something out of a great pre-tape piece on Saturday Night Live; no surprise that the director of the movie is Jorma Taccone of the Lonely Island, who also made the SNL spinoff MacGruber. The Lonely Island guys didn’t write this movie, but credited screenwriters Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney also have a sketch background, and there are enough funny throwaway bits and pitiless twists of fate to make you understand what likely made Taccone, Segel, and Weaving game to do it.
It’s a shame, then, that even given the movie’s darker and gorier impulses toward slapstick, this doesn’t measure up to Segel’s past relationship movies (or shows). At first, the screenplay does a nice job with the quiet accumulation of implied, petty-yet-vivid grievances as Dan and Lisa make their way upstate. But after a certain point, the sourness of this particular curdled-marriage story rarely feels specific to long-term partnership. It drops Apatow-style domestic realism and picks up one of the filmmaker’s more unfortunate and alienating habits: Placing its characters in the entertainment industry in a way that makes them feel that much less relatable. (The couple is supposed to be broke, but it’s hard to buy if Dan gets regular work directing commercials, no matter how humiliating that might feel for him personally.)
Over Your Dead Body also made me, a committed horror fan, wonder if maybe I’m getting a little sick of inventively over-the-top gore. The movie definitely goes harder on explicit maimings and killings than you might reasonably expect from a Jason Segel movie – it’s more like a Samara Weaving movie in that respect – only to no particular love-hurts end, because despite some shotgun brandishing and a few genuine skirmishes, the movie isn’t quite bold enough to have its spouses literally cut each other to pieces.
Over Your Dead Body doesn’t have to be as bleak as The War of the Roses to work, but it is jarring to watch Segel perform in what is essentially a pitch-black comedy of remarriage that feels so disconnected from the reality he brought to previous movie relationships. The fussiness and frustrations of both Dan and Lisa rarely feel especially organic to their personalities beyond the broad strokes of him being careful but self-centered while she’s careless and disdainful. This allows the comic structure to take over and dominate the movie. I don’t begrudge Segel getting back to something more fun to complement the more soul-searching humor of Shrinking, and Over Your Dead Body has its moments. But as the next step in his unofficial series of comedies about love, commitment, and marriage, it feels like a timekiller until the next big milestone — and an admission that maybe those will be happening more on his TV show going forward.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
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