Directed by Ruben Fleischer.
Starring Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin, Amber Heard and Bill Murray.
SYNOPSIS:
North America is now the United States of Zombieland. Only a handful of people are still alive, and they’re all looking for their place.
Rule #1 of Zombieland: Cardio.
You’ve got to be in peak physical condition to survive a zombie holocaust. Well, only if they’re the running sort. You could just take a nice stroll otherwise.
Perhaps running zombies are a sign of the times. Shuffling zombies captured the mindless, consumerist drive of the second half of the 20th century, particularly when ambling round a shopping centre. But people are more stretched and have things a little faster these days. You can buy online as well as the high street. Mainstream films have faster cutting rates. ADHD is a diagnosed condition. No wonder zombies are quite a bit faster. As our attention span shortens, so does a zombie’s patience.
So, yeah, ‘Cadio’.
Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) has created a list of ‘rules’ on how to survive the zombie holocaust in which he now lives. A mutated strain of mad cow disease had found its way to the human species via Patient Zero eating by a Gas Station beef burger. His list is honed by two months worth of experience since the epidemic hit. It’s also a neat summary of ‘zombie movie clichés’ to avoid doing in real life.
Rule #2, for example, is to never perform the ‘Double Tap’. That’s when you check if a zombie is dead by ‘double tapping’ it with your foot or something. Movie experience teaches that the zombie will not be dead (in the way a member of the Undead can be), only stunned, and will grab your foot to gnaw away.
It’s a welcome dose of geek logic. Countless, smoky conversations have been devoted to how to survive a zombie holocaust - whether you would team up, where you would fortify, what are the most effective weapons you could produce at short notice – and here is a film that bases its narrative reasoning upon such debates. Not only that, but the Rules are often included in the story and make sense within character motivations. Rule #4 is always wearing a seatbelt. So later on, when the neurotic Columbus is starting to relax amongst his band of survivors, he’s removal of his seatbelt actually means something. Zombieland is very well written in this respect.
Unfortunately, it is annoyingly directed.
It can be put down to the whole running / shuffling zombie debate again. Zombieland is a film of two halves. The first is overproduced with mostly pointless and juvenile flashbacks, gratuitous slow motion and some very grating, recurring onscreen graphics. Every time a ‘Rule’ is mentioned in Columbus’ voiceover, or an example happens within the action, an animated piece of text appears with the ‘Rule’ to which that specific action relates. Just in case, you know, you didn’t pick up on the visual gag.
An example - Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) kicks the back of an abandoned, wrecked car in the street. He then complains of pulling a muscle. To remind us all of ‘Rule 18: Limber Up’, a piece of animated text saying ‘Rule 18: Limber Up) appears on the back of the car as they walk away from it. It then falls on the floor and shatters like a plane of glass. It’s dumb, in a running zombie way. You get a similar sort of annoyance if you look at anything written in Comic Sans for too long.
The second half, however, takes the shuffling route. The graphics mostly disappear, the flashbacks aren’t as frequent and the film is thus given time to breathe. The characters start to interact more and begin to resolve their relative issues with trust. Columbus and Tallahassee are joined by Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin). You’ll notice that everyone is named after places in America. It’s where they’re each person is from. They don’t want to tell each other their real names. They don’t want to get too intimate. They’ve seen too many close friends and family die.
The gang hole themselves up in a mansion in Beverly Hills during this period. Not a single zombie appears during these scenes, and it gives them a chance to have fun again. It’s the film’s Dawn of the Dead moment, where they’ve secured the shopping mall and can start living rather than surviving. The owner of the mansion also provides one hell of a cameo, arguably the greatest comedic one in history.
And from those few middle act scenes, the film finds that it has a heart to protect from the zombies. Just maybe not much of a brain.
RATING ***
Oli Davis
365 Days, 100 Films
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