Jorma Taccone, the writer/director of POPSTAR: NEVER STOP STOPPING, made one of the ugliest films of the year. That takes work when your cast is Samara Weaving, Jason Segel, and Timothy Olyphant. The premise should have been dark-comedy gold: a husband and wife scheme to murder each other for the insurance payout, only for a chain of events to complicate everything. While those events feel like something out of Noah Hawley’s FARGO, they don’t quite hit it out of the park in the same way.
Blame the direction and the script, not the cast. Weaving, Segel, and Olyphant are fully game. A few set pieces frame the chaos well and earn a laugh or a grimace. They just don’t land often enough, and I never cared whether Dan (Segel) and Lisa (Weaving) killed each other or kissed and made up.
Final Thought: For a movie about two people plotting the perfect murder, OVER YOUR DEAD BODY can’t figure out how to finish anyone off, including a two-hour runtime that dies on the table. Here’s hoping Taccone’s next one has a heartbeat.
It’s currently streaming on AMC+.
