Life After Beth

Have you ever seen a movie that can’t sustain its premise? Life After Beth can’t even ACHIEVE it. The latest in a line of “dead significant other comes back” movies, LAB tries to be a quirky comedy, a dark comedy, an off kilter indie movie, and a horror movie, and it never accomplishes any of them. Credit goes to the stellar cast (Aubrey Plaza, John C Reilly, Paul Reiser, Matthew Grey Gubler, Anna Kendrick, and more) for being enjoyable to watch, but the movie around them spends its 80-ish minute run time (and you’ll feel every one of those minutes) fumbling for and failing to land on an identity. It just lurches forward, formless and directionless, as it stretches out an awkward relationship issue over the bones of a zombie movie with all the grace of a taffy puller. Characters shift tone and motivation based on the needs of movie the plot forward, not what actually makes sense. The movie drops hints of a larger zombie issue, but doesn’t coalesce them until the third act, at which point the world goes from everyday functional to literal fires in steel drums and ransacked grocery stores overnight. And even the very capable cast is handicapped by moronic writing that renders their characters ping-ponging from enjoyable to unlikeable. It’s unfair comparing this to something like Shaun Of The Dead, but even comparing it to Return Of The Living Dead 3 (also a girlfriend comes back from the dead movie) is a hard sell; that wasn’t a great movie by any stretch, but it’s consistent in its tone and comfortable in its identity. There’s as much work, and as much humor, put in the punny title as there is in the movie itself. That says it all.