R.I.P.D. 3D

Ryan Reynolds and Jeff Bridges aren’t exactly the purgatory version of Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy, stars of the other cop buddy movie set in Boston this summer, but they’ve got a similar wiener vs. renegade vibe. Reynolds is a cop murdered by his partner (Kevin Bacon, firmly stuck on Smarm) who upon ascending is recruited into the Rest In Peace Department by the always-welcome Mary-Louise Parker. Due to system overload a lot of the dead who are supposed to be in Hell have managed to escape capture and are walking among the living. It’s up to Reynolds and Bridges, an old-timey prospector type who died in the 1800s, to find them and send them where they belong. To call R.I.P.D. “cartoonish” is probably a compliment---the design of the “dead-os” is neither fearfully monstrous nor Hobbit-ly detailed, landing somewhere around animated Garbage Pail Kid---but it’s not quite fun enough for these four excellent actors to justify taking the money. More fun than Man of Steel, but The Heat is still out. —Tara Thorne