YMMV / R.I.P.D.

• Adaptation Displacement: The original comic book is so obscure, that a decade after the film's release, it still lacks a Wikipedia article.
• Complete Monster: Bobby Hayes betrayed his former partner in the Boston Police Department, Nick Walker, after the latter tried to give the gold that they stole to the authorities. It was revealed that he conspired with undead creatures known as deados and then tries to use the stolen gold in order to create the Staff of Jericho, an artifact which will reverse the flow of souls from Earth to the afterlife and result in The End of the World as We Know It. To activate the staff, Bobby kidnaps Nick's wife to use her as a Human Sacrifice, and after she is stabbed, Bobby taunts Nick that a human sacrifice for the staff doesn't necessarily need to be Nick's wife. It was revealed that Bobby did all of this so that he could slake his personal amusement.
• Gratuitous Special Effects: An unusual case: an effects-heavy action-comedy with monsters to fight seems like a reasonable place to use CGI. But the Dead-O designs are well within the ability for practical effects to portray, and the lacking CGI just makes them look fake rather than uncanny.
• Ham and Cheese: Many of the cast seem to get into hamming it up or playing their roles in a tongue-in-cheek manner. Ryan Reynolds, however, goes the opposite.
• Moral Event Horizon: Bobby Hayes crosses it in the beginning when he murders Nick.
• Narm: At one point, a news reporter can only think to describe the Dead-O's as monsters. Unfortunately, the Dead-O designs are mostly quite restrained, so they more accurately look like a gang of circus freaks.
• Nightmare Fuel: The fictional setting is one in which there is indeed an afterlife, but it governed not by any benevolent ruler with personal investment in every individual but by a Celestial Bureaucracy which is not only fallible but also limited in its power. Said bureaucracy does not take repentance or remorse into account when choosing which afterlife a person goes to, so someone who died trying to atone for a crime they committed will still be barred from the good afterlife. Additionally if you get shot with an afterlife weapon after you die then you get erased from the cosmos regardless of whether you were a good or bad person in life (several members of the RIPD suffer this fate in the final shootout), and the protagonists subject several dead-o's to this fate without hesitation or due process. To make matters worse, many who die slip through the cracks through no fault of their own and become dead-o's, and instead of understanding they are hunted down and taken in by the RIPD. RIPD is a Cosmic Horror Story by any sense of the word.
  • The prequel comic gives this a surprisingly creepy Ascended Fridge Horror, revolving around a telescope which allows one to gaze into heaven and see the face of God...and every single person who uses it becomes obsessed with killing Him at any cost, including one man who was previously a fundamentalist Christian. We never find out what it shows you, but it's clear there's something seriously wrong at the heart of this setting.
  "Do not let him speak to you! He will tell you the truth, and it will be unbearable! Kill him before he speaks!"
• So Bad, It's Good: Has a 13% Rotten Tomatoes rating, criticizing its generic nature and lack of depth, but some find it amusing nonetheless. The cheap CGI, the Ham and Cheese served up by Bridges, and bizarre elements like Roy's ankle obsession and Proctor biting Roy's goatee are all elements provoking this kind of reaction.
• Special Effect Failure: For a movie with an official budget of $130 million — and reasonable estimation that it actually cost $154 million — the CG effects look very cheap indeed.
• Spiritual Adaptation: May be the closest we ever get to a live action YuYu Hakusho movie.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: Some of the criticisms aimed at the movie is how it's just Men in Black ...WITH GHOSTS!
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Critics cited that the premise was indeed intriguing but the story and characters were too generic to do it justice.

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