IF AT FIRST YOU DON'T SUCCEED... // A FILM REVIEW OF "HERE AFTER"
Anyone who has seen Andy Karl on the NY stage ("Groundhog Day the musical" is one of my personal favorites) knows that he is a Goddamn treasure. A gifted actor who's also a triple treat, Karl can be big or subtle, can make you laugh or break your heart. So imagine my surprise when the new film HERE AFTER, which Karl takes the lead in, turns out to be a complete mess. Even with the help of several great actors in supporting turns, this romantic dramedy about dating in the afterlife never even remotely gets off the ground. The premise is simple, if a little depressing. If you enter the afterlife without having met your soul mate, you cannot enter. In fact, you have to return to earth and weed through the countless amount of single ghosts doing the same thing. Let's hope you get dropped off in the right city, cause you won't exactly be able to take an airplane to anywhere else.
Karl plays Michael, a man who gets hit by a car and ends up in a very over lit admissions room where he meets Scarlett (Christina Ricci, who's in the film far less than the marketing would lead you to believe). It's an after life pit stop and she lets Michael know that he has a bit of unfinished business to do. Since he didn't meet his soul mate on earth, he must return to do so before moving on. After hitting on a large number of ghosts who aren't interested, he finally meets Honey Bee (Nora Arnezeder) a woman who's alive but somehow can see him. They seem to hit it off, but the fact that she's not dead seems to be a dead end. Plus, the clock is ticking. If he's not able to discover a soul mate soon, he will simply cease to exist. Not exactly the cheeriest of set ups, but there ya go.
AFTER LIFE feels like one, very long extended scene on a Blu-ray extra reel. You watch it and go, "Yeah, I can see why they cut that out." But here, they didn't cut anything out. There are countless scenes that don't go anywhere, following Michael meandering around NYC or being creepy with his friend Angelo (Michael Rispoli) in a subplot that we certainly didn't need. Several seemingly interesting threads are introduced but never explored, such as meeting his grieving family but never using them fully and we never find out anything about Honey Bee other than she has a stalker. That last point shifts the film jarringly into a thriller and we realized just how much writer/director Harry Greenberger REALLY wants his film to be Ghost. The "rules" of this world are also very confusing. Michael can't touch anything but he can hold onto a coin cause he... died with it? Why? Just so he can make a lot of bad "Heads or tails" jokes? And why can Ghosts drink but not eat? Cause... it's supposed to be funny that they can get drunk? Honey Bee's character also only exists to give Michael a plotline. We find out nothing about her, nothing about her character or who she is as a person. Why can she see dead people? Who knows, who cares! She's just the female love interest in the film, she doesn't need a story!
This is clearly a film with a smaller budget and though I admire the scope of what they are trying to do, most of the scenes either look like they're lit by an Instagram filter or they're far too dark. There's also the odd choice that almost every second of the film has a score behind it. Like nearly EVERY moment. It's incredibly distracting and makes the film feel very amateurish. Lastly, this "romantic comedy" just isn't romantic. Or even a comedy. It's stale, dated humor that's often either misogynistic or in one case weirdly homophobic. It completely wastes the talents of Karl, Ricci and Arnezeder and saddles them with some of the worst dialogue you've heard in quite a while. When near the end, Michael looks at Scarlett and says, "Frankly Scarlett, I don't give a fuck," you will definitely let out an audible sigh, if you haven't already turned it off by then.
GRADE: D-
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY Harry Greenberger STARRING Andy Karl, Nora Arnezeder, Christina Ricci, Michael Rispoli NOW PLAYING IN SELECT THEATRES AND AVAILABLE ON DEMAND EVERYWHERE.