RUNNING ON EMPTY (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

Running on Empty, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 8, 2024

Maybe it's the inconsistent storytelling or the several, random necrophilia jokes, but Running on Empty leaves one wondering about the thinking behind this comedy about a man who discovers he has less than a year to live. How does he learn that fact? It's through the first of the four or five premises of director Daniel André's screenplay, which imagines a future in which one can learn the exact date of one's death within about a week's time of error.

That setup, as well as protagonist Mort (Keir Gilchrist) reckoning with the proximity of his death date, is pretty much dropped immediately in the movie. At least André is sort of upfront with us about the gimmicky and disposable nature of his sci-fi conceit, as the specialist assigned to determine the life expectancies of Mort and his fiancée Nicole (Francesca Eastwood) explains that it's achieved through "science" and a series of inscrutable tests not worth detailing. That's sort of a funny joke, except that it comes immediately after the movie gives us the exact same joke by way of an advertisement with the exact same punch lines.

Anyway, the gimmick is irrelevant, because Mort is less concerned about his imminent mortality and more despondent over the fact that Nicole dumps him after learning his fate. She has another 60 years of life ahead of her, after all, and she doesn't want the bother of being with someone who'll be dead in less than a year. Considering how shallow Nicole is and how devoid of a personality Mort is, the two seem an unlikely couple from the start—or maybe perfect for each other in an odd way.

That doesn't matter much, either, except as a reason for Mort to sign up with a dating service to get what's left of his love life back on track. The death-date gimmick gets a little more play here, since the dating agency bases its matches on potential couples who have similar life expectancies, except it doesn't actually do that, either. After all, Mort finding people who are as close as he is to death but who still want to make a romantic connection might have been an intriguing idea.

Once Mort ends up owing money to a pimp named Simon (Rhys Coiro) who keeps harassing and threatening him and those around him, it becomes pretty apparent that André is only interested in hinting at better ideas within this material. The filmmaker instead becomes caught up in diversions and distractions, which probably take a lot more effort to imagine and introduce than the pieces of narrative that right there in front of him.

Take how Mort ends up in debt to the pimp. At a bar, he meets a random woman, who flirts with him and invites him back to her place, where she reveals she's sex worker. Feeling bad for the sad guy, the sex worker offers him a "freebie" and promptly dies in his lap. Checking her ID, Mort finds that it was, indeed, her death date. Forget the many questions surrounding the coincidence and the motives of a woman who knows she's about to die in this situation, because André certainly does.

The pimp subplot takes up a surprising amount of storytelling space in this movie, which also shows Mort's work as his family's "adventure funeral parlor," where the deceased are staged doing what they loved in life, and his uncle Barry (Jim Gaffigan) trying to have sex with any woman who will have him and some of Mort's dates with women, who aren't soon-to-be-dead but want something from a guy who is. There's something to appreciate in how genuinely odd some of the details and jokes within these assorted, mostly disconnected scenarios are, but then again, it's even odder that both Barry and Simon separately suggest the notion of sex with corpses—more than once in the case of the uncle.

The movie takes us through this forced series of ideas, only to land on a straightforward and hasty romance with Kate (Lucy Hale). She's introduced in the first act, as the person who interviews clients for the dating agency, and only pops up again in earnest during the third act, when their relationship is consigned to a montage of hanging out and smiling at each other. It's a last-ditch effort to do something with some sincerity here. Running on Empty, though, is so uncertain about what it wants to do and how it wants to do those things that the schmaltzy, ultimately ironic final section comes across as just a disingenuous addition to the movie's confused methods.

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