Wristcutters: A Love Story

This film has a great premise and not enough intelligence to follow through with it. I'm unsure as to whether I'm being too hard on it because I wanted it to be something else, and it was what it was despite that. The general premise is that when you commit suicide you go to a limbo-esque world where everything blows in a quasi-suckish way: things break down, people are unable to smile. The premise is upheld through Zia (Patrick Fugit of ALMOST FAMOUS), who has slit his wrists and has been living in this limbo-world for a few months. He killed himself because he wanted to show his ex-girlfriend how much she hurt him, but instead of ending everything, he started everything: living in misery and apparently setting off a few more suicides. Here lies two problems with the film. 1) It creates this other world without explaining any logistics. Is it so much worse that a slum in Africa? Why do people work when they're dead anyway? How do they sleep? Why hasn't anyone tried to kill themselves again? This is where the film exhibits how it isn't intelligent. It doesn't take advantage of its premise and uses ugly coloring to create an uninteresting parallel world. Problem 2) Everyone has killed themselves to stick it to someone still living, but then they get it stuck to them because they don't get to die. How is that moralistically teaching anyone anything? The strength of WRISTCUTTERS: A LOVE STORY is its characters and how appealing they are. Zia meets a couple of friends on his quasi-road trip, and they make the movie with smart exchanges and dreamy musings about the world. I couldn't get past its primal problems, but WRISTCUTTERS: A LOVE STORY is a decent film that never took any obvious missteps except that it didn't go far enough. Were they afraid? Is this a one-joke, one-line film?
Wristcutters: A Love Story: ★★1/2