That Wasn't Valium



In this scene a brother and sister arrive at the funeral with the sister's boyfriend. Earlier in the film we've seen them getting ready to leave and the boyfriend, played by Alan Tudyk in the original and James Marsden in the remake, is nervous, so his girlfriend gives him what she believes to be Valium. It isn't. Here's the Death at a Funeral 2007 take:





This is the first really huge, huge laugh of Death at a Funeral 07 and part of the reason it plays so well is that much of the movie, as it was in the first scene we showed you, has up till now been pretty grounded in reality. Now that's contrasted with an absolutely ridiculous occurrence in which Alan Tudyk's character Simon has accidentally been given hallucinogenic drugs. Because it's so crazy, especially compared to how grounded everything's been up till now, the laugh is huge.



A lot of the credit also has to go to Tudyk, who gives an incredibly hilarious performance throughout the film. This is one of his best moments here. It's worth noting that even while Tudyk's behavior grows gradually more and more outrageous, the reaction of everyone around him remains fairly grounded in reality. Troy (Kris Marshall) knows that what Simon's been given isn't Valium, but he's hesitant to tell his sister that he's been carrying around illegal substances. He'll tell her later, but his first reaction is to step back and take it all in. That works. Everyone sort of gets out of the way and simply lets Tudyk be funny.



Now the remake takes a shot at the same scene:





The Death at a Funeral 2010 take on this moment suffers from much the same problem as the previous scene did. They seem intent, again, on filling every second in the scene with talking. The characters blather on constantly and though James Marsden seems like he might actually be doing something pretty funny here, the movie's unable to get out of his way enough to let him do it. Where Tudyk got several long, unbroken shots to simply wander around being ridiculous, Marsden's drug-addled moments look as though they were cut together from footage filmed on different days. It loses a lot of the uncomfortable, awkwardness which made the other version work so well. Instead of letting Marsden be funny, the film's too busy having Columbus Short blurt out the acid reveal that Death 07 delayed until later, to take in what's going on.



