'Life After Beth' review by Jake Boyle
Zombies are the ultimate example of having too much of a good thing. More often than not it feels like they're being used as the sole ingredient of entertainment, a sort of Get Out Of Boredom Free card. It's remarkable that in the ten-and-a-half years since Shaun Of The Dead, supplanting zombies into more mundane situations has moved from an exciting new take to utterly uninspired. For every Death Valley, it feels like there's a dozen versions of the BBC's woeful I Survived A Zombie Apocalypse.
Life After Beth moves around this by not really featuring much actual zombie-ing until over halfway through. It doesn't move it to anywhere funny, though, and eventually the whole charade just gets boring. The film is distinguished by this habit of making interesting albeit ultimately ineffective choices: the aura of creepiness from Dane DeHaan's protagonist is a nice departure from slacker everymen, but it's never really used to enhance the proceedings and only serves to make him significantly less likeable. The tone severely wavers between darkness and silliness, without ever really embracing either aspect for long enough to make something of it. There's probably good jokes to be made about burning corpses, and equally good ones about zombies liking smooth jazz, but the concepts are just brought up and left alone with no real attempts at constructing humour out of them. Aubrey Plaza's deadpan delivery can be phenomenally funny when paired with the right script, but when heard here it just sounds like she's as uninterested as the audience.
Life After Beth's most redeeming feature is Matthew Gray Gubler, mostly because his character's humour is derived from the ever-reliable 'being an asshole' variety of comedy, but his performance does seem a little more spirited than the others. By not asking us to feel much sympathy for him, he immediately becomes the most entertaining character, because everybody else in this movie is both so bland and so morally grey (and not in a complex way) that there's no real urge to give a damn about any of their dilemmas. Certain elements seem irrelevant altogether; delighted as I am to see Anna Kendrick in anything, her character adds absolutely nothing to proceedings, and one closing moment featuring her character threatens to completely overturn any dwindling sense of inventiveness and emotion that the film had clung on to. It's a scene that attempts to be sweet and optimistic but feels utterly forced, completely pointless and devalues any of the investment someone might have (hypothetically) had in the main characters.
Save for a few amusing moments and some encouraging but fruitless methods of presenting characters, this is just a poor movie. A weak script, unsure direction and a basic lack of comedy are major problems that can't really be overcome by any film, let alone one with as many other flaws as Life After Beth. It's analogous to a zombie itself; lifeless, grey and limp, but still just about crawling along. There are worse films out there (and equally bad ones that are much longer), but this is something that should only really be watched in circumstances of extreme boredom. Hard to believe it may be, but quite seriously, one of the funniest things about this comedy is that stupid title.
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