Review: Zombieland

Emma Stone is really pretty and is going to be really famous we bet

Submitted by mike, 10/02/09 10:54 AM

There’s been a sea-change in the inchoate zombie population. They started out as Haitian voodoo dudes suffering mind control, which I’m sure they weren’t that happy with, but that had to have been better for them than the cursed, magical, lurching, rotting wrecks that guys like George A. Romero changed them into. They remained thus until just recently, when movies like 28 Days Later and the remake of Dawn of the Dead stole their eldritch supernatural mojo, gave them some kind or another mutant blood virus, and let them sprint rather than shamble (much to the chagrin of dudes like the one seeing Romero speak recently at TIFF, cheering and wearing a “Fast Zombies Suck” t-shirt). What the zombies think about their new status as speedy, ill unfortunates is unknown. They seem angry though.

As the zombies themselves have matured, so has the film genre itself. Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland is an example of a recent spate of genre flicks that are twisting up their common tropes to tell stories that aren’t in any particular traditional way about, say, the zombies that their characters spend most of the film killing (the Spierig Bros. upcoming Daybreakers is another example, a corporate thriller set in the Vampire Apocalypse milieu). Zombieland is at its heart a shy-boy-meets-girl love story, its just that the boy and girl are two of maybe the only four non-zombie humans on Earth.

It’s a funny film, led by Jessie Eisenberg as Columbus. He has the same thing going on in this film as he did in this year’s very very good Adventureland: a self-assured Woody Allenish nebbishy aggressiveness that is equal parts entertaining and off-putting (as my movie partner pointed out halfway through the film, he has an impossible-to-ignore-once-you-notice-it staring problem).

The film positions itself at a point farther along in a theoretical zombie apocalypse than the normal zombie fodder does, at a point in which the survivors are not particularly scared of the zombies, having developed and honed their survival skills and lethality to the point that they represent little more than a nuisance. The film trades in the traditional zombie movie scares for laughs and gloriously disgusting zombie gore, as the heroes and the filmmakers find more and more brutal ways to kill them. There’s a scene in the middle of the film that is completely, utterly unexpected and absolutely hilarious, so much so that the film feels like a lead-up to and denouement away from the 8 or 10 minutes smack in the middle of it. It’s unfair almost, as its so good that it makes the rest of the film, which isn’t in any way bad and is in fact filled with beautiful riotous moments (including a spectacularly pretty title sequence), seem dull in comparison. It can never quite hang together. Taking the fear out of the zombie genre takes the suspense out, and that’s a big hole in the heart of this film that is almost filled with humour and character, but unfortunately, not quite. 6.6/10

Mike