One of Joe Dante’s best attributes is that, despite being one of the most observant satirists in film, his movies are indefatigably warmhearted and generous. Though he takes on subjects ranging from the military industrial complex to the socializing implications of children’s entertainment, Dante always finds some shred of understanding in everyone, be it an awkward suburban kid or a xenophobic politician who sets into motion the second Civil War. The director’s humanity makes the abject callousness of Burying the Ex all the more abhorrent; not only is it a bad film, it is the sort of mean-spirited, cynical film to which Dante’s work usually provides an antidote.
Working with Alan Trezza’s script, Dante makes a caricature out of Evelyn (Ashley Greene) before she even says a word. Her boyfriend, Max (Anton Yelchin), awakens one morning to find his half-brother, Travis (Oliver Cooper), passed out in his living room still entangled in a threesome, at which point he warns that Evelyn will “shit a Prius” if she finds him like this. He then goes on to complain that she won’t “let” him keep non-vegan food in the house, and when Evelyn finally enters the frame, she does so screaming at the top of her lungs for Travis and his dates to get out. Soon, Evelyn reveals an unforgivable sin: she hates horror films, something Max cannot abide.
Neither, it seems, can Dante. The director’s films usually brim with a wide-eyed intensity, as if everything in the film were being broadcast on TV and the camera recording it were a child with his eyes pressed up against the screen over the feeble protests of his parents. But Burying the Ex looks upsettingly like a parody made by an amateur, with no thought to the visual language at all. Basic shot-reverse patterns, telegraphed (but never witty) jump scares, and a handful of angled shots that make half-hearted stabs at Dante’s usual mania make up the aesthetic, and at times it seems like Evelyn’s buzz-killing vibe extends off-camera and fills the director with a malaise that stunts his joie de vivre.
And this is all before Evelyn even dies, hit by a bus on her oblivious way to be dumped. But soon she returns from the dead, horny and eager to rekindle her relationship with a disgusted Max. Dante has done zombies before, in the excellent HBO telefilm “Homecoming,” in which he imagined soldiers killed in the War on Terror coming back to vote out the neocons who leveraged vets’ lives for political clout. Compare the vicious commentary in that concept with the simplicity of this movie, which contains no deeper meaning than mocking Evelyn’s high-maintenance nature, and painting Max as sympathetic for wanting to move on with his new girlfriend, Olivia (Alexandra Daddario), who shares all of his interests and would never subject this poor soul to a nightmare like tofu.
What makes this all the more absurd is how unappealing Max is. He is an unkempt slob of modest means who clearly prefers his hobbies to his partner and only respects other people when they are as much like him as possible. The Dante of old would have approached this situation more equally, sympathizing more with Evelyn while also implicating Max’s selfishness in his unhappiness. The lopsided judgment levied at Evelyn is fundamentally unfair, and it lends the already unfunny screenplay a pointlessly nasty streak. A few jokes connect, like Evelyn trying to avoid killing Max on the hypoallergenic rug she bought just before her death, but such moments are few and far between, and it’s hard to shake the feeling that this cruel movie is the sort of film you watch Joe Dante projects to escape.