Starring Eva Longoria Parker, Paul Rudd. Written and directed by Jeff Lowell. (PG) 98 min. Opens Feb 1.
Paul Rudd fairly coasts through Over Her Dead Body, and it’s hard to hold his bemused boredom against him: he’s playing the Demi Moore role in a rom-com gloss on Ghost. Eva Longoria Parker is the distaff Swayze manqué — she’s Rudd’s fiancée, a brittle, demanding harridan who dies in a freak accident on her wedding day but can’t pass on to the next world until tying up all her earthly affairs. Red-headed Lake Bell gets the Whoopi Goldberg role: her low-rent psychic is enlisted by Rudd’s adorably meddlesome sister (Lindsay Sloane) to help him get over his dearly departed ex. Of course, she falls in love with him — incurring Longoria’s rather underwhelming supernatural wrath (and guaranteeing us second and third acts).
Rudd doesn’t need to put his heart into this stuff (he’s a charter member of Team Apatow, after all) but Bell, who starred in the unfortunately truncated NBC series Surface, pulls out all the screwball stops in the hope that this might be her There’s Something About Mary. It isn’t: she’s an adept physical comedian but the material is so thin — and Jeff Lowell’s direction so sitcom-bland — that her all-in effort seems somehow unbecoming.