Over Your Dead Body

by George Wolf

Why would Jason Segel plot to kill Samara Weaving?

Has he not seen Ready or Not? Borderline? Azreal? Ready or Not 2?

Segel is surely smart enough to play nice, but Dan – his character in Over Your Dead Body – is not. Dan and Lisa (Weaving) are off on a secluded weekend in a cabin by the lake. After 7 years together, they can barely say a cordial word, but this time Dan is laying the sweetness on pretty thick.

He’s cooked up a great dinner, along with a great alibi. Because after a nice boat ride on the lake, Lisa will sleep with the fishes.

Or not. Because Lisa has a plan of her own. And so do some convicts on the run (Timothy Olyphant, Keith Jardine) and the corrections officer who helped bust them out (Juliette Lewis).

Power shifts, violence and blood splatter ensue!

Writers Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney, fresh off the hilariously unhinged Pizza Movie, adapt the 2021 Norwegian film The Trip with a healthy scoop of witty cynicism atop one good ol’ American mean streak.

Segel and Weaving make an excellent pair of frassasins (friendly assassins), he of the emasculated man child and she of the exasperated younger wife wondering what she saw in this guy. Neither is blameless in the demise of the marriage, and the two actors make the deadly bobbing and weaving (pun intended) a surprising, squirm-inducing delight.

Those squirms only increase once the three fugitives enter the fray, and comic director Jorma Taccone (Popstar, MacGruber) forays into body horror with a respectable aversion to sparring the rum or the wisecracks. What starts out as an in-the-moment sendup of how couples avoid therapy takes a nasty turn in the second half. The threat of violence inherent in the premise makes for a smoother transition, but make no mistake: Taccone leans into that R-rating with some serious bloodshed.

If you’re fine with that, Over Your Dead Body is an entertaining genre blast that’s pretty hard to ignore. And by pretty, I mean pretty funny.

And pretty gross.