What a soul-crushingly by-the-numbers movie this is. Maybe the comic book it is adapted from has a bit more character but this blockbuster is a real stinker. It probably shouldn’t be too much of a surprise with Robert Schwentke (RED and Flightplan) at the helm but I was hoping the charismatic cast might have elevated it above the crappy Men in Black knock-off that it so obviously is.

Ryan Reynolds stars as a recently murdered cop who joins the Rest in Peace Department - a group of deceased officers saving the world from rogue Deados - as he tries to foil a plan to bring on the apocalypse. Teaming up with Jeff Bridges’ sheriff from the 1800s the pair trade…

July 13th, 1990. Paramount Pictures releases GHOST. It's a big summer movie with big movie stars and impressive special effects, but it's also a love story and an examination of how people handle grief and loss. It's entertainment, but entertainment with at least a little brains, made for adults.

July 19th, 2013. Universal Pictures releases R.I.P.D. It's a big summer movie with big movie stars and impressive special effects. It's basically the same concept as GHOST -- young husband is tragically killed (and SPOILER ALERT his best buddy is responsible) but on the way to the other side he's stranded on Earth to right a wrong -- only all the interesting things about GHOST (the love story, the grief, the…

I could see somebody making a serious argument for this being the worst movie ever made. And this is coming from a guy who at least moderately enjoys most movies. Fuck, I even thought the trailer for this thing looked fun.

There are no dramatic stakes. Nothing makes any sense. The only joke that even half works (the Chinese guy and the hot chick) is repeated at least a dozen times, to diminishing returns. And nobody seems to be acting in the same movie. Jeff Bridges camps it up to an impossibly irritating degree while Kevin Bacon plays things relatively straight and Ryan Reynolds... Well, Ryan Reynolds plays himself. Which isn't a bad thing, I like Ryan Reynolds, but his…

Perhaps a better title for Robert Schwentke's adaptation of Peter M. Lenkov's comic book series Rest in Peace Department would have been 'Dead in Black', or maybe 'Deadbusters', because RIPD has to be the most shameless attempted rip-off of both Men in Black & Ghostbusters we've ever been served. You'd think that attempting to xerox two such vibrant, funny, exciting sci-fi comedy adventures would mean RIPD might, if not equal them which of course would be a mighty tough order, at least give them a run for their money, but no... Schwentke's adaptation is leaden, poorly written, blandly performed, feels double it's fairly sprightly length, has some quite wobbly CGI and the most obvious narrative known to cinema. It is one…

RIPD, believe it or not, used to be a huge guilty pleasure film of mine. I saw it twice in theaters when it came out in 2013, and I bought it on Blu-ray pretty soon after it came out. I knew it was trash, but for some reason I found it to be entertaining enough to pop into my Blu-ray player every few months or so, thanks to its mindless and surprisingly well-shot action sequences and its brief runtime. Since I'm a Blu-ray collector, however, and this film is my hardest justification in my collection, I had to rewatch it with my older, more analytical pair of eyes two years after I last watched it to see if I still…

I can’t say I had high hopes for R.I.P.D - but I had hopes that it would at least be entertaining in the same way Men in Black was. The trailer set the film up to be a spiritual successor for MIB, which is odd because I genuinely appreciated Men in Black 3 for what it was. R.I.P.D. lacked any human compassion or emotion and seemed like it was cobbled together loosely from an executive who leafed through his kid’s comic book collection.

The film is incredibly lacklustre. It isn’t a fun romp, or clever in any way - it just exists in this weird limbo where the acting and story are just so abysmal that it makes you feel…