IFCDan (Jason Segel) is being weirdly emphatic about his weekend plans with his wife, Lisa (Samara Weaving). They’re going to spend the weekend in their remote cabin in the woods, he loudly tells his coworkers. She insists on going hiking in the mountains alone. Even though it’s going to snow. And she never hikes.You see, Dan has had it. A washed up TV commercial director who had one hit movie years ago, he’s been unhappy in his marriage for years and has decided to take the most drastic action possible: he’s going to murder his wife and collect her life insurance money. His plan is full-proof...until she tasers him just as he’s about to enact it.Because Lisa has had it too. A struggling actress who quit her full-time job to support her debt-ridden husband, Lisa is at the end of her rope. She has been chatting loudly with her friend about her husband’s insistence that they go hunting during their cabin trip this weekend. She doesn’t even like hunting, and couldn’t be asked to handle a rifle. Who’s to say if she were to trip and the rifle would accidentally go off?But that’s just the beginning of the wildly violent dark comedy Over Your Dead Body, Jorma Taccone’s remake of Tommy Wirkola’s 2021 Norwegian film, The Trip. Like The Trip, Over Your Dead Body begins with the premise of a married couple trying to off each other, before things take an unexpected turn when three escaped criminals (or in the case of Over Your Dead Body, Timothy Olymphant and Keith Jardine’s two criminals and Juliette Lewis’ prison guard that helped break them out) take them hostage. But unlike The Trip, a nasty action-horror film with a cruel streak, Over Your Dead Body is caught between Taccone’s goofier comedic stylings and the dark, brutal turn that the story takes. The result is a tonally unbalanced and mismatched movie that never quite earns its brutality.You can tell that Taccone, best known for being a member of The Lonely Island comedy group and directing the terrific music satire Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, is more comfortable in the zippier first half of the film, which employs a clever flashback device to backfill the story whenever a new twist unfolds. It’s a smart trick from screenwriters Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney: It turns each new revelation — Lisa’s murderous mission, the arrival of the three criminals — into a sharp punchline, lending the film a sort of meta-humor that Taccone obviously excels at. But it’s when Olyphant, Jardine, and Lewis enter the picture that things take a turn for the shockingly grim, and disappointingly straightforward.Dan and Lisa get taken hostage by three criminals hiding in their cabin. | IFCAs soon as the trio takes Dan and Lisa hostage, Over Your Dead Body transforms from a snappy, heightened meta-comedy into a more straightforward home-invasion thriller. And when Taccone does inject some comedy into the proceedings, it feels woefully out of place. The problem is that Taccone’s humor, though it has a dark edge, doesn’t have the cruel streak it needs to maintain the tone through the brutal second half of the film. His comedy is on the goofier side, with some moments so absurd that they felt like they could spin off into a Lonely Island sketch. It’s not the tone that Over Your Dead Body needs, especially when it adapts some of the Norwegian original’s darker, more violating turns.The cast doesn’t do Over Your Dead Body many favors either. Jason Segel, who adopts a dead-eyed stare in an attempt to tap into the film’s more brutal elements, feels miscast, especially for Dan’s Straw Dogs-esque turn. Samara Weaving is mostly in final-girl mode, subtly resisting Lisa’s more unlikable qualities. Olyphant and Lewis are the ones who best match the story’s dark wavelength, communicating a fantastically sinister glee over taking their new hostages. But even they can’t save the film from feeling like a misguided Hollywood remake of a distinct kind of Norwegian black humor.Over Your Dead Body was originally intended to be helmed by The Trip’s director Tommy Wirkola, before he left the project in 2024. And you can tell that Taccone took over a project that was started by another director with darker, meaner sensibilities than him — the tonal whiplash between the two disparate parts, the halfhearted attempts to lighten up a brutal script. Even when the film descends into a cartoonishly gory bloodbath, it feels like the film’s of two minds; between going full horror-comedy, or embracing the brutality. It makes you wish that Taccone had it in him to embrace the latter, instead of retreating to the comforts of a goofy Lonely Island-esque meta-joke.Over Your Dead Body premiered at SXSW on March 14. It releases in theaters April 24.