Joe Dante’s...“Burying the Ex”

[Pizzamorg]

Originally Posted by Hellraiserfan

I haven't seen it yet but I'm going to write this off because Yelchin is the small guy/geek and in this society those guys don't deserve to get the girl. Am I right or off base here?

I lifted this directly out of my review for the film and then tweaked it so these paragraphs read on their own so if any of it reads kinda weird, that would be why. Spoiler tagged just in case.

[Show spoiler]On the surface the film is fairly innocent, it’s dumb wish fulfilment which involves utterly ordinary, average and not special in any way Max in a love triangle that has him choosing between two mega babes, Evelyn and Olivia, played by Ashley Greene and Alexandra Daddario respectively. A spanner is thrown in the works, however, when Evelyn comes back from the dead and grows increasingly less like herself and more like a monster as the film progresses.

That sounds pretty good, right? Well the potential is certainly there, but the problem is the whole film is just so poorly written, so black and white, Olivia is played literally as the living embodiment of perfection itself while Joe Dante and the team seem to HATE Evelyn and that is basically the whole damn movie. The problem is in that Evelyn never actually well… does anything all that wrong. She certainly has her faults, like any human being, but she's nowhere near as bad a person as Dante wants you to think she is. What do you hate most about Evelyn, Dante? Her good heart? The fact that she looks after herself? Maybe that she points out that Max’s piece of shit brother (who is not funny, no matter how hard the movie tries) is a piece of shit? God, what CRIMES against humanity! Even things I think are meant to be faults, like her clinginess or controllingness is played in way that makes it seem like she is a Terminator sent from the future to do one thing, have sex with Max and satisfy all of his fantasies without any question. How misogynistic and she's a bad person again... why?

I really did feel genuinely very sorry for Evelyn by the end, it just feels like the film is punishing her for things that aren't her fault and not punishing the characters who have actually done bad things. Max does nothing to help her at all which really does put the onus on Max, not Evelyn like the film wants you to believe. Actually to highlight what an unlikeable **** he is, after his girlfriend literally comes back from the dead, his first ****ing thoughts are about breaking up with her and killing her again. Ugh. Evelyn's arc to me became a compelling tragedy, she is an innocent person who has put her all into a relationship, to the point that it literally kills her to which she gets nothing in return.How cynical it all is, as Max gets all the rewards and none of the consequences.

It’s worse because Dante is so pathetically in love with Olivia that she never once seems like a real person. I really like both of these actresses but Greene got shafted and Daddario is wasted.