Producers: Robert Ogden Barnum, Greg Lauritano, Daniel André, Lucas Jarach and Luke Daniels Director: Daniel André Screenplay: Daniel André Cast: Keir Gilchrist, Lucy Hale, Francesca Eastwood, Rhys Coiro, Jay Pharaoh, Dylan Flashner, Lisa Yaro, Annie Abbott, Monica Potter, Leslie Stratton and Jim Gaffigan Distributor: Lionsgate
Grade: D
When a comedy just doesn’t work, it can be well-nigh excruciating to watch. That’s the case with writer-director Daniel André’s feature debut “Running on Empty,” a quirky jumble of genres and tones that’s as awkward as its lead character.
He’s Mort (Keir Gilchrist), who works at the “adventure” funeral home that his late father owned and is now run by Mort’s desperate skirt-chasing uncle Barry (Jim Gaffigan), a guy who’s constantly, and futilely, trying to link up with pretty young things online. Mort, whose job involves posing the corpses to reflect what they enjoyed doing in life (the place’s specialty), is engaged to beautiful but vain and self-absorbed Nicole (Francesca Eastwood), though how that implausible coupling came about is never made clear.
As part of the process of trying to buy a house, he and Nicole hope to persuade the sellers, who prefer young bidders planning to have families, to choose them by enrolling with an outfit called Life Day Count, or LDC, which uses unexplained scientific methods to determine precisely when each client is going to die (unless murder, suicide or accident intervenes). When it turns out that Nicole has sixty years left on her countdown clock and Mort less than one, she unceremoniously dumps him.
Presumably depressed, though it’s hard to tell since his dour, deadpan manner hasn’t changed much, Mort decides to hire a dating service called Till Death Do Us Part, which caters to LDC clients who have come up short in the longevity department. After taping a video self-introduction with sympathetic camerawoman Kate (Lucy Hale), he goes off to a bar, where Rita (Leslie Stratton), a young woman fending off a pushy patron, pretends that he’s her date and invites him to her room. To Mort’s surprise she’s not only a sex worker but one whose death date is that very night. When she suddenly expires while attempting to give him a “free” blow job, her nasty pimp Simon (Rhys Coiro) arrives and demands that he pay for services supposedly rendered.
At this point the movie takes a curious turn, concentrating on Mort’s harassment by the increasingly menacing Simon (who, in all fairness, is in turn being pressured by his boss to collect what’s due, leading him to demand more and more). But it makes room for digressions like pep talks to Mort by his voluble co-worker Sid (Jay Pharaoh), delivered in the form of profane stand-up riffs; a date montage with the awful prospects the agency provides; and a spectral appearance by Mrs. Harrison (Annie Abbott), a former co-worker who returns from the dead while he’s prepping her corpse to encourage him to live the rest of his life to the fullest. There’s even a weird episode when Nicole invites Mort to the palatial home she shares with her new fiancé (Dylan Flashner), and they jointly come on to him.
Then another shift occurs as Kate reappears when Mort goes back to the agency to complain. With her return the movie turns for a time into a romantic comedy, complete with the sweet montages typical of that genre. But when Simon threatens her unless Mort pays up, the resultant confrontation between the men turns dark again, though apparently it’s meant to be shot through with humor that never materializes. The outcome of their fight nonetheless points to a happy ending, which is soon upended by one, briefly foretold at the start, that’s sappily message-oriented instead.
The bumpy plot of the movie, with its jarring transitions, is made even more irritating by the garishly artificial look of Ryan Kaercher’s production design, Susan Doepner-Senac’s costumes and Matt Klammer’s cinematography. The heightened style is also an integral part of Gilchrist’s stilted performance, which comes off as one long nervous tic; and while the others don’t go nearly as far as he does, they’re basically cartoonish as well; only Hale escapes unscathed, and her role is comparatively brief. None of them are aided by Ethan Maniquis’ heavy-handed editing, or by a score by Keith Weidner that struggles, in its tinkly way, to emphasize how charmingly odd the entire exercise is meant to be except when it’s supplanted by the obligatory needle drops.
At the beginning of “Running on Empty,” Mort remarks in voiceover narration that most of life seems pointless and absurd to him. Most viewers will feel that those adjective aptly describe the movie, too.