Fashionably Late Reviews: Zombieland

I didn’t see the new Predators movie last night but since I promised a review up on Monday I decided to post something else. Enjoy.


There comes a time when any critic must stick their neck out and voice a very unpopular opinion, and that time is now for me. I’ve worried about entering this deadly domain where my opinion goes against the grain of pop culture and even the vast critical consensus as it appears on sites such as rottentomatoes.com. So to what movie is this blasphemy aimed? Today I’ll be talking about the undead phenomenon that is, Zombieland.

Before I go any further I would just like to state for the record that I do not in fact hate Zombieland, I just think it is a very overrated movie that probably deserves a B- rating overall. When this movie came out it was all the talk of the movie world; critics, fans, even people who disassociate themselves from zombie paraphernalia went in droves to see this movie. People were saying this was the best zombie film since Day of the Dead while others claimed it was the greatest comedy of 2009. All I could think was whether or not I was in fact watching the same movie that everyone else had seen because what I saw was something that failed to live up to its promise and became a paint by numbers comedy seated within a Zombie apocalypse.

I feel like the focus of my negative criticism actually revolves around the infidelity the movie has towards its own premise. When I first saw a trailer for this I was stocked. To me this was a film adaptation of all the great zombie parody material that were coming out in bookstores like The Zombie Survival Guide or a much sillier American take on the Shaun of the Dead film (Which is better btw. I’ll briefly touch on this later). Instead what I received was a movie that opened with a bang but quickly felt the need to skate along familiar ground to avoid sinking in a lake of creative genius.

The movie opens by taking to the ground running as the audience follows the socially awkward protagonist as he carefully explains his overly analytical methods of zombie survival. His observations are so deeply thoughtful that they end up being absolute gut busters and quickly have the movie goers siding with an otherwise uncaring and unlikable misanthrope.

Now a 90 minute movie cannot survive on the strength of one geek doing warm up stretches before each zombie altercation so they throw a humorous monkey wrench into the scene in the form of Woody Harrelson, the Ted Nugent of zombie hunters. He’s a crude redneck with all the class and tact of a serial killer baboon, but more importantly he is the counter point of the protagonist that constantly points out the futility of his scientific method. There’s no deep philosophical question centering on the grace of zombie survival, there’s just explosions and guns. He is the Moe to the Curly, the Hardy to laurel, the Eric Cartmen to butters, that perfect balance of exact opposites being forced to work together for the greater good of hilarity.

For the first 20 minutes the movie functions on a similar level of crazy comedy that Monty Python operates. It doesn’t take itself too seriously and is willing to dispense with plot if it means getting a great joke across to the audience. Honestly, this highly pressurized attention to comedy was something that has been sorely missing from comedies over the past 20 years or so and I was hoping that this would be the movie that broke the mold once and for all. Alas, two cock blocking females waltz on set and it all goes to pot.

I’m not trying to be sexist or anything, but one of the things that work well with buddy comedies is when there are no distractions to keep the characters from growing far apart. The two women in this movie are the banal instruments of movie storytelling that quickly herald in the incredibly sluggish middle act. Rather than continuing to focus on what was sold to us in the trailers and the first act of the film, the creators decide to force feed a sappy love story into the middle and make us care about two hormonal teenagers that I simply couldn’t give two shits about.

Remember the romance in Shaun of the Dead? Remember how it actually worked to strengthen the film and get the audience invested into the characters’ personal problems? Well it worked because the movie starts out with almost no zombies; in fact the first act of Shaun of the Dead is used to establish the very human elements of the characters. Sure, they’re nothing more than selfish twats but you get to see them each struggle with their own imperfections and once they find their courage you can’t help but cheer them on as they go about their half-brained scheme and sift through zombie carnage.

In Zombieland we get two horny teens who are presumably the only teenagers left in America as far as the film is concerned and because he finds his courage and because she’s – um, hot I guess, they fall madly in love. That’s a pretty big *yawn* for me. How about giving me characters I actually WANT to see find true love and happiness? How about giving the characters a bit more depth? Actually no, forget that, what is love doing in this movie at all? Get back to the humor! I don’t want love in a movie called Zombieland that features Ted Nugent humanoid machines of destruction, I want joke after joke after joke juxtaposed into a hostile environment.

Love isn’t the only characterization problem in this film, early on it’s revealed that the reason Woody Harrelson is the psychopath presented on screen is because this whole end of days scenario killed his adorable puppy dog, the one love of his life. This is so simplistically clever that I wanted to applaud when I first saw it, but then reminded myself that applauding in films is absolutely pointless and stupid. How does one justify the actions of a person with no compassion for his fellow man and wants nothing more than to destroy the shambling remnants of humanity? Kill his puppy of course. Sadly (major spoiler coming up), towards the end we discover that the term “pup” was just a pet name used for his infant son. Congratulations, Woody Harrelson’s character has been made human. No, no, no, please stop film makers. I don’t want this character to be sympathetic I want him to be the inhuman focal point of all jokes in the film. What does this revelation serve to the plot? Sure it helps define who he is, but so did the dog. Does knowing he had a son make him any more likable? No. Does it explain his obsession for Twinkies? No. The only possible explanation it can serve is strengthening his bond with the main character in some sort of metaphorical father/son dynamic, but that seems like a cop-out since their bond is balanced upon hype thin tissue paper. Besides, his inability to deal with both humans and the human like undead is better realized with his adoration of animals. Just a thought, but wasn’t this supposed to be a comedy? Whatever.

Another thing that troubled me was the strange network of zombie knowledge shared amongst the survivors that was never fully explored. Take for instance the scene from the trailer about “zombie kill of the week”, and think about its context within the film. Outside what they showed in the trailer there was little else to the punch line. An old lady drops a piano on a zombie and she earns the dubious title of zombie kill of the week. Here’s the question though, how do these characters know this?

I’m all for suspending my disbelief, but are we to assume there is some underground network of zombie information being channeled to all survivors? If so, why don’t we get more of this in the film? That was a genuinely hilarious moment and I would have liked more of it. Oh, but wait, we have to shift through the love first. *Hourp!* sorry, I just puked a little.

When expressing my opinion on this matter, most common refutations I hear relate to the enigma being part of the joke, that there is no need to explain because the mystery is more entertaining than any sort of explanation that could have been provided. First of all I feel like that is a pretty weak excuse and secondly why was it even in the film in the first place? That scene seems almost like it was left over footage from another portion of the movie, like perhaps the credit sequence or even the prologue where they show all the various scenes of zombie mayhem. Within the context of the scene it seems forced like the editor needed to add another 40 seconds to the final cut of the film and had the characters briefly reference this joke and then abandon it completely. Zombie kill of the week may not have been a great running gag, but they could have taken this idea of an omniscient knowledge data base to the next tier and really ran rampant with the jokes.

The last complaint I have goes back to the characters, in this case its Abigail Breslin. She is an outstanding child actor and I love her to death, but what is she doing in this movie? When I first saw the poster of the movie and saw her wielding a pipe I got pumped. I couldn’t wait to see her mutilating those undead heathens! Yet this scene is missing from the movie. She never does step up to the plate and do any hardcore zombie killing; instead she hangs out in the background. When the need arises for her to actually do some slaying she screams like a little girl and seems a bit reluctant to even pull the trigger. Then again, this all ties in to that scene where she is being trained to use a gun by Woody… forget it. I have seen Kick-ass and I know that films can create badass little kid characters. Abigail should have been the Hit Girl of this movie, it would have added a lot of fun to the experience, but again, this isn’t a movie about pure comedy, this is a movie about giving you the standard Hollywood boy meets girl love horseshit.

Ok, admittedly the movie isn’t bad, in fact I’ve watched it more than once if that’s any consolation, but this is a movie that could have been MUCH better. Remove all the stock character arcs which end up being about as flat as Kate Hudson’s breasts, dispense with the need to shoe horn in a love story which is completely devoid of any rich potential, and focus more on the things that make the movie fun to watch and I swear they could have created the best comedy of the decade. Well, they didn’t do those things and they managed to churn out a movie that ended up not being so memorable but is in no way a complete throw away. Watch it if you haven’t seen it, hell the big cameo during the end of the second act is enough to pay the full $5 for rental.