Director – Paul Leyden, Screenplay – Andrew Klein & Paul Leyden, Based on the Comic Book Created by Peter M. Lenkov, Producer – Ogden Gavanski, Photography – Bruno DeGrave, Music – J. Peter Robinson, Visual Effects – Cinemotion VFX Bulgaria (Supervisor – Victor Trichkov), Special Effects Supervisor – Szabolcs Princz, Prosthetic Makeup Effects – Daniel Hamori, Production Design – Zsuzsanna Borvendeg. Production Company – Universal 1440/Dark Horse Entertainment.
1846. Roy Pulsipher is the sheriff of Horseshoe, Wyoming. He is just about to greet his daughter Charlotte as she returns to town with her fiancé when outlaws attack. During the midst of this, Roy is shot. He comes around in the afterlife. He is offered a position on the afterlife police force the R.I.P.D. who are tasked with retrieving deados, escapees from Hell who inhabit the bodies of the living. Roy eagerly signs up without reading the fine print when he finds that his first assignment sends him back to Earth to investigate happenings in the mining town of Red Creek, Utah. He is accompanied by a partner Jeanne where they find that they are incarnated in avatar bodies of two African-American women. Roy diverts off-mission to deal with his killers as they are taken away by marshals but finds that the men are inhabited by deados. The trail leads to Red Creek where they find that a demon inhabits the body of Otis Claiborne who is forcing people to dig in an old mine that will open up a gateway to the afterlife and unleash Hell on Earth.
R.I.P.D. was originally a comic-book from Dark Horse Comics, created by Peter Lenkov in 2001. It was then adapted into the big-budget theatrically-released film R.I.P.D. (2013) from Universal starring Ryan Reynolds and with Jeff Bridges stealing the show as the undead sheriff Roy Pulsipher. The film was not a box-office success and received bad reviews.
This is a sequel, although more correctly a prequel, to the 2013 film. Rather than a theatrically released film, it was turned over to Universal 1440 Entertainment, a Universal subsidiary that specialises in making direct-to-video sequels. The director and co-writer is Paul Leyden, as Australian actor who previously had parts on a number of shows, usually soap operas, including As the World Turns (1956-2010), The Young and the Restless (1973– ) and Home and Away (1988– ). Leyden had previously directed the horror film Come Back to Me (2014) and the non-genre Chick Fight (2020).
R.I.P.D. 2 arrives as another sequel that nobody asked for, spinning off from an IP that was no great shakes in the first place – R.I.P.D. 1 was the 87th highest grossing film of 2013, while Rotten Tomatoes gives it only a 13% positive score and Cinemascore a C+ rating. All of which surely loudly declaims that it is not exactly a film that seems to be have audiences begging to see more adventures.
Jeanne (Penelope Mitchell) and Roy Pulsipher (Jeffrey Donovan)
The continuing character that the sequel chooses is Roy Pulsipher, who was played by Jeff Bridges in the original. Here Bridges is replaced by Jeffrey Donovan and the film tells an origin story for Roy. While Donovan gives a fairly straight but perfectly serviceable delivery, he has considerably less than the comic gregariousness that Bridges brought to the original (where he ended up stealing the show). One oddity is when it comes to the 54 year old Jeffrey Donovan replacing Jeff Bridges who would have been around 63 when the first film was made. This leads to the peculiar question of do ghosts age? – as Roy Pulsipher appears to get a decade or more older between 1846 and 2013.
The rest of the show is fairly much a riff on the original but transferred to a Western setting with a fairly lazy plot about evil demons trying to open a portal to Hell and unleash Hell on Earth. Donovan gives an entertaining enough playing, while Richard Brake has quite an evil presence in an otherwise nothing role. The deados this time are presented as fairly generic looking CGI black things.
