Burying the Ex starts out by painting out the broad strokes of a relationship that isn’t working out. Max and Evelyn (Anton Yelchin and Ashley Greene) have just recently moved in together. The sex is great, but Evelyn is manipulative and controlling. She is forcing her vegan and environmentalist lifestyle on him, and doesn’t support his dream of opening his own Halloween-themed store. He is planning to break up with her when she gets into an accident and dies. Max is destroyed, but is starting to pick up the pieces with Olivia (Alexandra Daddario), an ice cream shop owner who happens to love all the things he does.
Unfortunately for Max, Evelyn comes back from the dead. Apparently, a demonic artifact has reanimated her corpse, and the undead Evelyn is as intent as ever to spend forever with Max. This is all meant to be funny, but the film has an ugly mean streak that never registers as humorous. It loses sympathy early on, as it tried to paint Evelyn’s fairly benign type-A personality as worthy of outright disdain. The film constructs the flimsiest of straw men; basically treating environmentalism, veganism and blogging as traits that indicate an inherent evil in one’s soul.
That’s overstating it a bit, but not by much. Basically, the film vilifies women who don’t conform to a particular fantasy of the doting wife figure that’s cool with the half-brother having threesomes on the couch and likes everything that you like. This is basically the alternative represented by Olivia, who isn’t so much a character as a collection of quirks and obsessions. The film stands up for the right of young slackers to be slackers, to refuse to grow up and stand up to their domineering girlfriend figures.
Because in the world of this movie, relationships are an either-or proposition. Either their apartment has vintage posters up on the walls, or Evelyn tears them down to make way for her waste segregation system. There’s no room for compromise, and therefore she is the villain. It’s immature at best and sexist at worst. Perhaps this outlook would be more palatable if the movie delivered anything that was remotely compelling. But despite being handled by the great Joe Dante, the film as a whole lacks directorial verve.
The film is light on the smart, subversive humor for which Dante is renowned. There is some gore, but it’s mostly too tame to be interesting. The storytelling is unremarkable, and the production can’t quite hide its budgetary limitations. The acting is all right. Anton Yelchin tends to be better when he gets to show some energy, but his slacker character here is okay. Ashley Greene succeeds at making her character truly unlikable, but that’s not really a good thing. Alexandra Daddario is cast in the manic pixie dream girl role, which doesn’t really provide much of a platform for any actual acting.
Burying the Ex doesn’t even rise to the level of enjoyable schlock. The script is founded on too many lazy premises, all of it built on a very mean spirited depiction of a woman. It is pretty odious when you get right down to it. The film could have easily depicted a relationship on the rocks without resorting to the straw man methods that come to define Evelyn. It would have at least made the conflict a little more interesting. It would have been funny to have the main character at least consider actually being with Evelyn, death and all. But the only point this film wants to make is that women can be crazy. We can do better.
My Rating:
