I checked my watch – 52 minutes into this 91-minute film we finally get what we came for: a blend of undead action mixed with Plaza’s brand of unfazed “millennial” humor. Listen, I know this is a low budget movie, but when you’ve got a juicy premise like “Zombie Aubrey Plaza” the last thing anyone wants to watch is histrionic yapping. Shunted not, as you might think, for the sake of good jokes or for Sam Raimi-esuqe bloody mayhem, but for scene after scene of loud and desultory talking. The script hints at some depth by examining our innate longing to have loved ones return, but this is soon shunted aside. Soon enough Plaza’s Beth “returns” and her parents and Zach are overjoyed. Some are playing this for drama, some are playing it for laughs and none of it is coming together.
Her first overly caricaturish moments make plain that the script, the direction and the performers are not on the same page here. Beth’s mother is played by Molly Shannon, and is something of the canary in this tone-deaf coal mine. The opening scenes work well enough as drama, with Paul Reiser and Cheryl Hines as Zach’s warm parents, and John C Reilly as Beth’s bereaved father. Dane DeHaan plays Zach, who is having a hard time moving on after the freak death of his girlfriend Beth, played by Plaza. One soon recognizes this all a cover for one key issue: a lack of original ideas. It is a style of film-making that hopes it can glide its way into your good graces on ad-hoc performance flourishes, a wall-to-wall audio mix and editing patches.
Life After Beth, a frustrating affair due to its waste of resources, feels rushed and under-rehearsed.
#THE BETH MOVIE MOVIE#
Who’d have thought that Plaza’s mediocre film To-Do List, a 90s-set sex comedy that didn’t quite catch on with critics or audiences, would seem so terrific just one summer later? That movie at least had some solid zings and cinematic set pieces. Please, someone, anyone, give Aubrey Plaza better material. And the woebegone Rust, the poor man's McLovin, is ill-suited for this in so many ways that you don't even have to get into his appearance - no timing, no sparkle, zero chemistry with Hayden.Īt least this should quickly become one of those blips on Panettiere's resume, a Leprechaun for the New Jennifer Aniston to roll her eyes about on Conan's couch a few years down the road.“Y ou know,” I thought to myself during one of the many circumlocutory and not-particularly-funny sequences in Life After Beth, “this is probably some sort of metaphor about the universal desire to retain one’s youth.” I would have pursued this line of thinking further if I thought the movie deserved the effort, but instead I spent its numerous dull spots offering up a Hollywood prayer. The movie was adapted by the fellow who wrote the novel, Larry Doyle, and is so tone-deaf as to make one fear for American publishing. There is no way to discuss this movie without wondering if there has ever been a more successful awful director than Chris Columbus. The reason this was made was to escort young Panettiere from "cutie" to "hottie." But did they need the lame cocaine jokes, the military bashing, the parents (Alan Ruck, Cynthia Stevenson) playing hide-the-vibrating-cell-phone? She is flattered, and over the course of a long and tedious graduation night, Denis and his pal Rich (Jack Carpenter), whom he outed in his speech, follow Beth and "The Trinity" (Lauren London and the hilarious Lauren Storm) as Beth drives her Yaris like a long lost Andretti, flees her maniacal military boyfriend and knocks herself off the pedestal Denis put her on. And that girl he has lusted for, but never ever spoken to? She ( Hayden Panettiere) gets his punch line. Paul Rust is the charmless, uncharismatic lead, Denis, a nerd who uses his valedictory speech to tell his classmates what he really thinks of them. Let's also state they probably won't find much to laugh at in this emphatically unfunny comedy from the guy who owes his career to Home Alone. Let's state emphatically that America's teens are too smart to do most of those things. Oh, to have teenage kids just so I could forbid them to see I Love You, Beth Cooper.Ī miscast and misjudged graduation-night comedy, Cooper occasionally - only occasionally - wanders into "harmless." Much of the time it's sending bad messages about, oh, driving without your lights on after dark, using sex to score beer and letting peer pressure determine your sexuality.
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