New Details Emerge About Ryan Reynolds' Next Comic Book Movie

Maybe Ryan Reynolds will have more success with his next comic book movie. Then again, with a CBM filmography of Blade:Trinity, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and the much maligned Green Lantern, I'm not too sure you want to bet the house on that one. [Regardless of whether you liked the film or not, Green Lantern is a financial failure] However, maybe a CBM with an intentional comedic tone will play more to Reynolds' strengths. Recently, io9 got their hands on the script for R.I.P.D. and it sounds like the lead character in the comic was tailor made for Reynolds.

In R.I.P.D., Reynolds plays Nick Walker, a Chicago cop who gets gunned down by his partner, Simon Hawes. And then Walker wakes up in the afterlife, where he's offered a chance to join a secret elite police force: the Rest In Peace Division. So many people are dying nowadays, due to the soaring population, that some of the dead manage to escape from going into the light, and instead hide out on Earth. Walker's job is to spend the next hundred years hunting down the dead on Earth.

Walker gets paired with a veteran partner: Bocephus "Bo" Pulsipher, a former Wild West lawman who died back in the 1800s. There are many, many funny scenes of Bo showing Nick the ropes, including the two of them watching Nick's funeral and Bo commenting on the mediocre turnout. Bo is kind of a grouchy old stick-in-the-mud who idolizes Hoyt Stenson, the lawman he partnered with when he was alive. He's sort of a gruff mentor with a hefty dose of the crazy — and the dynamic between Nick and Bo is not that dissimilar to the Will Smith/Tommy Lee Jones relationship in the first Men In Black. Zach Galifianakis was originally supposed to play this role but he dropped out and Jeff Bridges signed on to take his place.

Anyway, part of the way the R.I.P.D. move among us unnoticed is that they are camouflaged: when people look at Nick and Bo, they see Nick as an elderly Chinese man. And they see Bo as a statuesque beautiful woman with giant breasts. In one scene, Nick tries to go talk to his widow, but she just sees a Chinese man talking gibberish to her. In other scenes, men keep coming up to Jeff Bridges and begging him to dance in their music videos.

Oh, and whenever the secretly dead get upset or want to exert more power, they turn into monsters, with blobs and tentacles and stuff. They're sort of like monster ghosts, akin to Ghostbusters, but also not that different than the monsters that the M.I.B. hunt in their movies. The R.I.P.D. hunt them down with special guns, firing "soulkiller" bullets, and other special ordinance. There is a lot of mayhem in this film, as the undead cops chase ghosts all over the city and they trash everything in their path.

Without giving too much away, there's more to Hawes than just a dirty cop, and it turns out that a mistake that Nick made when he was alive has a bearing on a potentially apocalyptic case the R.I.P.D. is investigating now.

The newest draft starts with a monologue by Bridges, whom we see bringing in a suspect, and then cuts to Nick planting a tree (and burying some evidence.) Also, the latest version eliminates some minor bad guys and changes the role of Hawes, the cop who kills Nick. And there's a bigger role for Nick and Bo's boss, Procter, who's rumored to be played by Jodie Foster.

Oh, and one thing I like about the movie is that it's made clear several times that there are always more apocalyptic crises around every corner. As Procter says towards the end: "You think this is the only crisis we ever faced? It's just been daisies and unicorns up until last week? The trouble doesn't end with St. Peter's Key. These ancient civilizations practically crapped magical artifacts."

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