Running on Empty (2024)

2 Stars (out of 4)

Feuling About

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Presumably starting off as a dark comedy, but then morphing into a rather routine — and unfunny — comedy-romance, Daniel André's odd, bland Running on Empty seems built from bits of other movies with a minimum of effort.

Mortimer "Mort" Mortensen (Keir Gilchrist) works in a funeral home with his uncle Barry (Jim Gaffigan), and is forever clad in a neat black suit. With his fiancee Nicole (Francesca Eastwood), he gets a Life Day Count test, and discovers that he has less than a year left to live. Nicole leaves him, and he begins a series of misadventures.

He meets a girl in a bar, which leads to an unsavory run-in with an angry pimp, Simon (Rhys Coiro), who demands increasing amounts of money for a perceived wrong. And a dating service leads to strange encounters with various women (one of whom steals his jacket and wallet). But when Kate (Lucy Hale), who works shooting videos for the dating service, befriends him, things start to look up again… at least for a while.

Running on Empty focuses on a character whose name 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 goofy supporters (Gaffigan mostly makes crude sex references) and the free-wheeling outsider girl (Hale), all of which 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 laughs, especially one in which 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 bugaboo, however, is probably the Mort character. Forever clad in his suit (with white socks that are visible in long shots) and with his pouty, innocent expression that rarely changes, he doesn't seem real or relatable. The title (it was changed, at some point, from Mort in Sherman Oaks) 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 means nothing here, other than to hint that the movie, indeed, has run out of gas.