Parents' Guide to Running on Empty

Presumably starting off as a dark comedy before morphing into a rather routine—and unfunny—romcom, this odd, bland movie seems to have been built from bits of other movies with minimal effort. Running on Empty focuses on a character whose name literally means "death" and is set partially in a funeral home where the corpses are posed doing lifelike things; it seems to want to follow in a kind of Harold and Maude mode, but its disaffected tone makes everything seem pointless. And when it suddenly jettisons this attempt at dark comedy and Mort tries to learn how to live, it becomes just ... regular. The characters seem like cutouts, including the kind of goofy supporters (Gaffigan mostly makes crude sex references) and free-wheeling outsider girl (Hale) we've seen hundreds of times before. (SNL's Jay Pharoah, who plays the funeral home's driver and appears in a just couple of scenes, gets the movie's only real laughs, especially in a scene where he helps suspend a lady's corpse into a hang-gliding pose.)

The movie also resorts to several uninspired montages to shove its story along. Its biggest problem, however, is probably Mort himself. Forever clad in his suit and with his pouty, innocent expression that rarely changes, he doesn't seem real or relatable. The title is a further suggestion of the movie's general sense of lethargy. Running on Empty is also the name of a classic Sidney Lumet movie, and it means nothing here, other than to hint that the movie, indeed, has run out of gas.