Over Your Dead Body Review: Jason Segel & Samara Weaving’s Action-Comedy Is Too Messy For Its Own Good

2 weeks ago 10

Jason Segel and Samara Weaving struggle over a gun in Over Your Dead Body

Published Mar 17, 2026, 7:01 AM EDT

Gregory Nussen is the Lead Film Critic for Screen Rant. They have previously written for Deadline Hollywood, Slant Magazine, Backstage and Salon. Other bylines: In Review Online, Vague Visages, Bright Lights Film Journal, The Servant, The Harbour Journal, Boing Boing Knock-LA & IfNotNow's Medium. They were the recipient of the 2022 New York Film Critics Circle Graduate Prize in Criticism, and are a proud member of GALECA, the Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics. They co-host the Great British Baking Podcast. Gregory also has a robust performance career: their most recent solo performance, QFWFQ, was nominated for five awards, winning Best Solo Theatre at the Hollywood Fringe Festival in 2025.

A distinct strain of sadness runs through Over Your Dead Body. The Lonely Island's Jorma Taccone, working off a script from former SNL writers Nick Kocher & Brian McElhaney (better known as the performance duo BriTANicK), infuses this circus-like portrait of marital disharmony with a solid dose of necessary physical comedy, but it can still be rough to be subjected to two distinctly depressing characters behaving as poorly as possible toward one another. It can also be wickedly hilarious, and when it works, the film plays like an exceedingly violent take on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Over Your Dead Body Is Hilarious & Tense – But Loses Steam By The Final Act

At its most side-splittingly hilarious, Taccone's film successfully imagines the likely mess that would occur if two unhappy people, independently of one another and with no prior history of criminal activity, tried to follow through. And then, as if to mess with us, too, BriTANick's script continuously throws out whatever it has set up in favor of cascading insanity.

Frustratingly, that approach doesn't always fulfill itself. Over Your Dead Body has a considerable amount of fat on it, and feels distended. Something like this should logically build and build upon itself until it boils over, but, partly because of its consistent flashback structure, the film never succeeds in finding a proper groove.

Dan and Lisa have been married for seven years, but things have clearly been bad for a long time. Two creatives with fledgling success, they share a penchant for turning on each other in order to cope with their respective disappointments. Dan hasn't made a feature film since his first one, nearly a decade ago, and has had to resort to filming commercials and pop-up ads. Lisa fancies herself a serious theater actor, but doesn't book very often, though Dan also insists that she not work a day job so that they can "keep up appearances."

Both are very tired of the other's excuses. Lisa criticizes every little thing Dan does; Dan is controlling and micromanages. Dan has squandered away most of their money; Lisa's been having an affair with a guy from her acting class. Both are very much in over their heads when it comes to pulling off murder and making it look like an accident. But their wrestling match is quickly sidelined when they find that two escaped convicts and a security guard have been hiding in their cabin's attic.

Pete and Todd (Timothy Olyphant and Keith Jardine, respectively) were serving life sentences for murder. Allegra (Juliette Lewis), hopelessly in love with Pete, helped them escape. And now the five of them are locked in a ridiculous game of survival. For the most part, Taccone keeps us effectively in step as he shifts between legitimate tension and clown comedy, but just as frequently, everything feels more askew than anyone can keep up with. There is some aggressively dated humor here, starting first and foremost with a clichéd runner about rape that reeks of homophobia and dangerous misconceptions around life in prison.

Ultimately, Over Your Dead Body is too messy for its own good. It is unable to settle into any one choice. The repeated motif of flashbacks and plot twists is fun, but not always useful in keeping the ball up. The action beats distinguish themselves from other genre fare by mostly emanating out of controlled incompetence, like Buster Keaton with heaps of blood, but comically and dramatically, Over Your Dead Body exhausts itself well before the final body lands.