“Running on Empty” is a dark comedy that tests the comic limits of the infamous “Gen Z stare.”
A deadpan rom-com about death, it has reliable comics in supporting roles and co-stars Lucy Hale. And it is stillborn thanks, in part, to the expressionless turn by Keir Gilchrist, our leading man, who plays a young mortician (“post-mortem artist”) who would like to find one last love before his impending death.
Gilchrist, also star of “It’s Kind of a Funny Story” (It wasn’t.) is Mortimer Mortensen, a 30ish bore trapped in the black suit he wears everywhere and every day, even when he’s not prepping corpses in “How they lived their life” poses — skiing, parasailing — for death photos.
“Adventure funerals” is how he and his uncle (Jim Gaffigan) pitch this concept to their Sherman Oaks and Greater LA patrons. And it’s a hit. What movielover or critic wouldn’t want to be captured, post mortem, in a mock up of a cinema, wearing 3D glasses as the way they’d like to be remembered?
Mortimer is engaged to Nicole (Francesca Eastwood, you-know-who’s kid) and house shopping. He’s the practical-minded one. But when she can’t talk him into a house just beyond their means, they’re persuaded to get their “LDCs” to ensure they’ll have decades and decades together to justify this expense.
Your “Life Day Count” is a service provided by a medical science startup that will tell you, with “97.9%” certainty, the day of your death.
No, they can’t anticipate accidents, murder or suicide.
So “How exactly do you figure that out?”
“We just do.”
Nicole has a death date over half a century into the future. Mortimer? He’ll be dead within the year.
Writer-director Daniel André takes a sort of “We just do” to this fanciful conceit, and that spills over into the rest of the movie. Neither we nor Mortimer are told of how he’ll die. No medical condition is mentioned, no treatment suggested. And as André has already scripted himself into a corner — no “accident, murder of suicide” is predictable — he just skips by that.
“Skips” is entirely too merry a word for anything that happens in this stiff of a comedy.
Awkward meals with Mortimer’s family (Monica Potter, Dustin Milligan and Clara McGregor) have no pulse.
There’s not much amusing about the dating service that’s set up to take advantage of this new “We know exactly when we’re going to die” world. Til Death Do Us Part’s interviewer/videographer Kate (Lucy Hale) allows herself to connect with the colorless Mortimer. But not before we endure a generally joyless bad-dates montage of women who either share Mortimer’s predicted-death situation, or who just aren’t interested in “commitment” or anything um, long term.
The film’s big “obstacle” to Mortimer’s dating-until-death plans is a misunderstanding with a sex worker that leads to endless, escalating threats from a pimp (Rhys Coiro). That story thread — which begins with the hooker reaching her “death date” — has promise that the script never realizes.
Comic Jay Pharoah, playing the hearse driver for Uncle Barry (Gaffigan) patters away for laughs that never come. Gaffigan is pretty good at deadpan, but there’s not much funny to work with here.
Mortimer’s profundities about reasons not to fear death aren’t even worth quoting, much less packaging in a fortune cookie.
And through all this humorless flailing in front of and behind the camera — you’ll notice shots literally repeated (the same sailboats pass by Mortimer and Kate as they chat on a Marina del Rey pier) — Gilchrist never delivers more than a shrug or that generational stare.
It’s not wholly his fault that “Running on Empty” is comically empty. But he does nothing to compensate for the inadequacies of script or direction, not that anyone else in the cast could.
Rating: R, slapstick violence, “sexual content,” profanity
Cast: Keir Gilchrist, Lucy Hale, Jim Gaffigan, Rhys Coiro, Jay Pharoah and Francesca Eastwood was
Credits: Scripted and directed by
Daniel André. A Lionsgate release.
Running time: 1:31
