HE NEVER DIED (2015) Surely Isn’t Alive

You know, I really tried to cook up an interesting little opening paragraph, but this flick leaves me with nothing. So this is He Never Died.

Jack (Henry Rollins) is a social outcast who spends his days sleeping, watching TV, eating at a local diner, and playing bingo. The only people he has regular contact with are his land lady, Jeremy (Booboo Stewart), and waitress Cara (Kate Greenhouse). Then, his daughter Andrea (Jordan Todosey) re-enters his life. Will she be able to pull Jack outta his funk? We won’t know because she’s kidnapped by some mobsters. Big mistake. What the mobsters don’t realize is that Jack is an immortal being with super-strength – and has an insatiable craving for human flesh. And he wants to get Andrea back. And with the help of a potential love interest, Cara (Kate Greenhouse), Jack intends to do just that. Will he succeed? Will he fail? Will you stay tuned long enough to find out?

The biggest problem with He Never Died is that it suffers from an identity crisis: it never knows what it wants to be. Does it want to be a film about cannibalism as a metaphor for drug addiction? An off-kilter father/daughter bonding movie? A quirky romance? A revenge flick? In fact, it’s all of these. In being so, however, it fails at being any of these. And this is because it doesn’t flesh out any of its identities: just as you start getting to know one, it changes. By the third or fourth swap, you’re left shrugging your shoulders as any feelings or desire of investment go right out the window. Had the movie just focused on one or two aspects, or had writer/director Jason Krawczyk fleshed out the identities a bit more, we could be looking at a classic. As is, the movie is little more than a mild 90-minute diversion. And an easily forgettable one at that. And it doesn’t help matters that the film ends on an abrupt, anti-climactic beat. Just when you think the flick might redeem itself, roll credits! I literally said, “What!? That’s it!?”

For a film about a cannibal, there is surprisingly little cannibalism going on. I mean, that’s the film’s biggest selling point and it hardly delivers. What little cannibalism there is isn’t anything spectacular. Just a few nibbles here and there. The immortality aspect also seems tacked on. They don’t really do much with it, and it seems to only be here so Jack can’t die, also for a mildly comedic scene in which he details his past jobs.

If the film could be said to have one thing going in its favor, it’s the performance by Henry Rollins. While it seems wooden at first, it soon becomes apparent that that is part of the character. Jack has simply “been there, done that” to such a degree that emotional investment in anything is pointless. And Rollins’ deadpan delivery of his lines is where the film’s few comedic moments lie.

Final Thoughts:

He Never Died is a fairly mediocre flick with little to offer. A lack of focus and pretty much everything else turns it into little more than a diversion from cleaning your house or just something to play in the background. If you skip it, you ain’t missin’ anything.