R.I.P.D.
R.I.P.D. was the second of two movies I saw today with my friend Nick. We both agreed that it was fun. Lower-case "fun." No exclamation points.
My Twitter review runs thusly:
R.I.P.D. is a burrito made by rolling Ghostbusters, Ghost, and Men in Black in a buddy-cop tortilla, and then forgetting the awesome-sauce.
The acting was fine, and the story was fine, though a little too predictable. The mythology was where it fell apart for me. They did some fun things with it, but I felt like a lot more could have been done, and the ending, where I'm expecting a surprising-yet-inevitable resolution (as I'm often treated to with secret-world stories, or really anything in which a new mythos and methodology is revealed to the audience), was a pretty straight-up slugfest.
You know that point in a film where you look at what the hero is doing, and you know it makes sense because it's what you would try, but you're sure it isn't going to work because the story structure doesn't have enough fail in it yet? Yeah, this film has that moment, and guess what. That thing the hero is doing TOTALLY WORKS! Straight-up slugfest.
It was certainly fun, and the final fight was a treat to watch, but as I walked out of the theater I was already trying to rewrite the film to be tighter. Also, by the end of the movie I really needed for Jeff Bridges to spit out whatever it was he had in his mouth. I loved his character and the way he played it at first, but by the end I wasn't seeing "old cowboy." I was seeing "Jeff Bridges is tired of having that thing in his mouth."
R.I.P.D. didn't truly disappoint me, though. It comes in at #13 for me as of this writing. I liked it, but it sure could have used some awesome-sauce.
(Note: Don't go with a belly full of good Indian food. Jeff Bridges gets some in his beard...)