In the alternate present or near-distant future of Running on Empty, scientists have discovered a method of determining almost precisely how many days remain until a person dies. This is, obviously, a remarkably potent idea for the premise of a movie, and to his credit, writer-director Daniel André has thought of a few promising directions in which to take that premise. Generally speaking, there would seem to be three: It could be a thriller with a built-in ticking-clock mechanism, although that would be the least useful of the options. The film could be a drama, telling the emotional story of a young man who discovers he has less than a year to live and decides to take control of his life for the first time. André, instead, takes the third option, which is to turn the film into an absurdist comedy that often believes it’s too quirky to confront the loaded ideas in its scenario, and that means it sometimes and quite awkwardly incorporates elements from each of the other two options.
Mortimer (Keir Gilchrist) does discover that he has a little more than 300 days to live, but he’s generally too shy and too indecisive to take control of anything in his life, even in the face of his certain, looming demise. The news that his remaining days are literally numbered and so low is mostly an inconvenience to Mortimer, while his parents (an iffy Jim Gaffigan and a wasted Monica Potter), who have recently become estranged, react with either comic indifference or uncontrollable crying. His work buddy Sid (Jay Pharoah) just wants him to loosen up with a trip to the club.
The problems are compounded for Mortimer, though, by the sudden and callous way that his ex-fiancée Nicole (Francesca Eastwood) left him upon learning that their death dates were so far apart and immediately took up with the more traditionally handsome Randall (Dustin Milligan), who, like her, has nearly 60 years left before shuffling off this mortal coil. To unwind and take Sid’s advice, Mortimer does venture out to a bar, where he meets a beautiful woman (Leslie Stratton) who allows him a bit of excessive PDA in return for a trip back to her place. It turns out she’s a professional escort who has reached her final day to live, and Mortimer ends up on the hook for her death in the eyes of her psychopathic employer Simon (Rhys Coiro). It’s also a matter of the money that Simon believes Mortimer owed the woman.
A remarkable amount of screen time is devoted to this silly plot involving an improbable series of misunderstandings, although it’s even dumber once one digs beneath the surface of the subplot. If Mortimer is to die in roughly 300 days, then nothing else will lead to his death before that, meaning that the tension of this entire set-up is both cheap and nonexistent. Then again, if André is saying that something like a weird bit of violence could undermine the natural law that has been developed by the scientific process that led to its discovery, doesn’t that also undermine any of the inherent cleverness of the gimmicky premise? If Simon came at Mortimer with several machine guns and let the bullets fly, would they all just barely miss the fatal mark, and for that matter, wouldn’t the pimp know about his employee’s death date?
It ultimately doesn’t even matter, because the whole situation resolves itself with a whimper, and after all, there’s a much better and altogether more promising avenue for this story anyway. In a world where people learn their approximate but likely death date, of course a service is created for matching together those single adults who have only a short time left on Earth. Mortimer partakes in this service, and eventually a romance develops between him and Kate (Lucy Hale), a technician and videographer who once had dreams of Hollywood stardom. There is such a genuine rapport between these two characters that, when the movie cuts back to the stuff with the pimp, the feeling is of having the wind cut out of our sails.
In fact, Hale is so good in this role, as a woman with a lovely outlook on life and a lot of affection for this new guy that has dropped into hers, that we wish the movie were about Kate. That’s despite Gilchrist’s appropriate likability as Mortimer, whose name is revealed early on to be a pretty bad pun about his job in a funeral home. That awkward joke runs all the way through this screenplay, which keeps coming up with other bad ones to give itself something to do. Running on Empty is so distracted from what really works about its central scenario that it keeps the movie at a regrettable distance.
Photo courtesy of Lionsgate
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