John C Reilly: 5 Awesome Performances & 5 That Sucked

5 That Sucked

5. Maury Slocum - Life After Beth (2014)

The biggest problem with Life After Beth is that it's never as ingenious or as original as it seems to think: the unknown zombie trope is something we've seen quite a lot recently, and unfortunately for almost every film in the sub-genre, it's an idea that plays out best as a short sketch.

When elongated to a feature like this, it gets flabby and outstays its welcome, no matter how good the cast seem to be. The central gag runs out of fuel pretty quickly and at that point it's the responsibility of the other elements to pick up the slack.

Unfortunately, Life After Beth was clearly written with the assumption that the zom-com element would be enough, so it leaves nothing else. Reilly (and co-star Molly Shannon) is left without any substance to play with. That means an absence of performance - he's no more than narrative furniture and it's a terrible waste.