If you head into this thing knowing only the sales pitch, you might be tempted to spend its entire 105 minutes judging whether leads Jason Segel and Samara Weaving can keep up with the Joneses—or, in this particular corner of the spousal-homicide market, the Smiths.
What unfolds is less Brangelina's sleek, sexy marital combat than the “we buy fake blood by the pallet at Costco” school of filmmaking. Closer to this year's other Weaving-anchored Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, only with a little marital resentment mixed into the arterial spray.
We start off by shadowing Dan (Segel), a man noisily and awkwardly building an alibi. Anyone unlucky enough to wander within earshot gets an unsolicited briefing on Lisa's (Weaving) upcoming solo hike, an expedition Dan describes with all the confidence of a man who has already commissioned the missing person posters.
Dan's Dangers of Hiking Press Tour finds a particularly unreceptive audience in his father Michael (Paul Guilfoyle), who's more interested in complaining about his nursing home nemesis Kevin than entertaining the sales pitch. But the failed stop reminds us that Segel's comedic gift—the ability to radiate bashful, self-deprecating warmth even while playing a man planning his wife's murder—is still very much intact.
As the couple heads to their lakeside cabin for a weekend we’re pretty sure will be anything but relaxing, the tension between them doesn't play coy. And a scene or two of obligatory pre-homicide domesticity later, we're ready for the main event. Just as Dan makes his move with a chloroform-soaked rag, Lisa spins around, tases him, ties him to a chair, and unveils an itemized list of matrimonial grievances long enough to ensure there’s plenty of time for the balance of power to flip yet again.
Dan’s co-conspirator arrives before this exchange grows stale to knock out Lisa, and then, almost immediately, is a casualty of the couple’s spectacularly poor marksmanship, leaving the supporting cast suspiciously barren outside of the dreadful couple. Thankfully, three additional lunatics have been patiently waiting in the home's attic this whole time, and they drop into the mix right on cue.
Escaped convict Pete (Timothy Olyphant), his deliciously unhinged girlfriend and corrections officer Allegra (Juliette Lewis), and human wrecking ball Todd (Keith Jardine) had selected the cabin as their post-prisonbreak chalet, but the couple’s arrival for their weekend retreat exposed the unfortunate double booking.
Classic mix up.
That Olyphant has the exact comedic chops needed to play a baddie with some hilariously eclectic interests should surprise no one familiar with Go or The Girl Next Door. Has he seen Dan’s only feature-length film? Of course he fucking has.
From there, director Jorma Taccone puts his Lonely Island instincts to work in an action comedy where imminent death keeps interrupting Dan and Lisa’s apparently more pressing personal grievances. The couple moves through the requisite stages of learning to cooperate under threat of dismemberment, even finding time to tearfully confess their respective contributions to the marriage's collapse while hiding in closets from the bandits actively trying to murder them. We also get a deranged detour involving Guilfoyle stealing nursing home orderly Kevin's Fast & Furious muscle car. It of course has got its own plans to murder the senior citizen’s patience with its Ibiza-oriented sound system and empty gas tank.
By the time Guilfoyle finally drives in like a wrecking ball the pacing has turned entertainingly erratic and the bad guys are all doing their best Daniel Stern screams.
None of this is exactly groundbreaking, the marriage-repair portion of the proceedings holds few surprises, and nobody is venturing outside their established wheelhouse. But the cast is game, the carnage is well-seasoned with comedy, and the whole thing makes for a pretty entertaining little getaway.
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