Zombieland (2009)
Rated R for horror violence/gore and language
Score: 4 out of 5
It's somehow appropriate that one of the most memorable scenes in Zombieland comes in the form of an extended cameo by Bill Murray as himself, because in many ways, the film feels like a throwback to the high-concept comedies of his '80s glory days. The plot is perfunctory: two months ago, a mutated form of mad cow disease caused the dead to rise from their graves to eat and infect the living, wiping out most of humanity, and a small group of survivors is fighting to stay alive. But unlike many other zombie films, Zombieland is not at all interested in the darkness often found in this premise. What it has the most in common with is the Dead Rising series of open-world zombie video games, all of which have moments of pathos but which are otherwise primarily focused on neat ways to kill zombies and have fun in a world where the rules no longer apply, as well as a larger-than-life cast of characters who send up various zombie movie tropes in their own unique ways. It's a zombie movie made on a real budget that takes the piss out of all the nihilism that's so often found in the genre, instead focusing on the things that people love about zombie movies: great kills, a great cast, and a fun atmosphere that turns the end of the world into a playground for the lucky few who made it. Yeah, a lot of the humor is dumb, and not all of it holds up; Shaun of the Dead this ain't. But it's dumb fun made by people smart enough to know how to do it right.
There are really only four major characters in this, not counting the Murray cameo or the people seen in brief flashbacks to the characters' lives before the outbreak. All of them are known by their nicknames, taken from the cities they're from: Tallahassee is a gruff, hard-bitten survivalist with a mysterious past, Wichita and Little Rock are sisters who were petty crooks even before the apocalypse and are still crooks now, and finally, Columbus is the straight man, a dweebish gamer in the old world and a extra-cautious loner of a survivor now. Columbus is the audience POV character, outlining how to survive through a long series of "rules" that he came up with for surviving the zombie apocalypse: stay in shape with cardio, shoot a downed zombie again to make sure it stays down, always wear a seatbelt, don't be a hero, and other common-sense ideas that he has a knack for framing in humorous ways. Jesse Eisenberg may not have shown a lot of range as an actor since this film, but he's perfectly cast here; there's a reason why his career took off afterwards, because he made Columbus into a guy one wouldn't mind hanging out with. That said, the spotlight is almost never on him. No, that would be Woody Harrelson's Tallahassee, named for the capital of Florida and very much a Florida Man. He loves guns, Hostess Twinkies, and killing zombies, not necessarily in that order, he paints a number 3 (a la Dale Earnhardt) on the side of every vehicle he drives, and the end of the world seems to have brought a measurable improvement to his life, allowing him to become the ultimate doomsday badass. Harrelson reminded me of an ever-so-slightly toned-down version of Trevor from Grand Theft Auto V, one without the comical sex perversions but with the exact same personality type and tendency to go off on something for reasons that usually amount to "because I was bored", delivering most of this film's big laughs and standout set pieces in the process. Wichita and Little Rock, meanwhile, drive what passes for a plot here, robbing the protagonists blind before reluctantly teaming up with them in order to reach Pacific Playland, a California theme park filled with old memories for the both of them. Just as Eisenberg's performance makes it clear why he became the go-to guy in the ensuing decade for playing dweebish, nerdy protagonists, there's a reason why Emma Stone has gone on to become an A-lister, as she imbues Wichita with most of the film's emotional core. Her entire goal in the film, going to Pacific Playland, comes down to the fact that she loves her sister and wants to see her happy, and she finds herself extremely conflicted over her relationship with Columbus, who she finds herself falling for even though her survival plan is to avoid personal attachments to anybody other than her sister. Abigail Breslin plays Little Rock as a kid who had to grow up too fast even before the zombies came, but one who is, at heart, still a kid who gushes about Hannah Montana to a bewildered Tallahassee. She's a charmer here, about as far from Little Miss Sunshine as possible even if the film seeks to undercut any potential darkness in her character.
That scene more or less encapsulates the film's brand of humor. It may just be the most lighthearted R-rated zombie film ever made, firm in its rejection of the grit and cynicism that characterizes so much modern zombie fiction (perhaps best exemplified by The Walking Dead) to the point where, if it were released today, it might be seen as an outright parody of the genre instead of a comedy about such. Its inspirations are not other zombie films, but the "Frat Pack" comedies that dominated the 2000s, movies like Old School, Wedding Crashers, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, and that year's The Hangover that relied on broad, raunchy humor seemingly written to be quoted by an audience of college kids. It is the bloodiest such comedy, to be sure; the characters kill a ton of zombies here, and every single one of those deaths is played for laughs, especially when they start getting creative and going for Zombie Kill of the Day. Director Ruben Fleischer is great at this kind of dumb fun action, showing off the mayhem in all its glory and setting up and delivering on some awesome moments. As befitting a comedy that began life as an idea for a TV show, the plot is entirely secondary, the film as a whole reminding me of a lot of "sketch movies" that are more or less excuses to string together a bunch of gags, all loosely connected by a thin plot. It certainly had zero interest in allowing the audience to develop any emotional stakes in the characters, which was a double-edged sword. On one hand, it meant that there was little getting in the way of its non-stop, rapid-fire stream of jokes, and at times it could subvert expectations to remarkable effect, most notably when Little Rock pretends to be infected so that she and Wichita could rob Tallahassee and Columbus (this film has no time for "zombie infectee" drama). On the other hand, its attempt to give a tragic backstory to Tallahassee was immediately undercut seconds later when it segued into a joke about crying while watching Titanic. I still had plenty of reason to care about these characters, thanks to their well-rounded personalities and the actors' excellent performances, but at times it felt like the film wanted me to keep my distance from them.
The Bottom Line
For as overexposed as zombies have become in the time since this movie came out, Zombieland still holds up remarkably well as a relentlessly straightforward, lighthearted, and very fun comedy. No, it's not the greatest zombie comedy ever made, but it is the one you could easily throw on at any hour, flip to any scene, and laugh your ass off.
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Zombieland: Double Tap (2019)
Rated R for bloody violence, language throughout, some drug and sexual content
Score: 3 out of 5
Zombieland: Double Tap, the ten-years-later sequel to a 2000s Hollywood comedy classic, had a long, uphill battle trying to live up to its predecessor. On one hand, the entire cast now is at least B-list, with each of them having at least one Academy Award nomination under their belt and Emma Stone in particular an Oscar winner and three-time nominee hailed as her generation's Meryl Streep; the all-star cast alone would make this an event. (See: the above poster.) On the other hand, zombie fiction reached the apex of its popularity followed by a long collapse around mid-decade as the genre was run into the ground, while the film comedy styles of the 2000s, like those before it, have grown passé and been displaced by new voices in the genre. The fact that this film seems so defiant in its attempt to root itself in the late 2000s, then, is perhaps both its greatest gift and its greatest curse. On one hand, the same things that made its predecessor work are all here, and watching it felt like going back to a simpler time, a fact that the film constantly alludes to with its stream of 2000s references ranging from Obama "Hope" posters to Von Dutch shirts. (Watching this felt like witnessing, in embryo, the form that the nostalgia cycle is going to take with my teenage years. Man, I'm getting old.) On the other hand, the same random, bonkers humor that worked so well in 2009 felt stale here, and the attempts to add some plot to the story were mostly for the worse, particularly with some of the newer characters going in places far less interesting than the film seemed to be setting up. To go with my Bill Murray comparison from before, if the original Zombieland is like Ghostbusters, then this sequel is like Ghostbusters II, the lesser sequel that's doomed to live in the shadow of the original but isn't as bad as I bet fans are gonna be saying down the line.
Set ten years after the start of the zombie apocalypse, this film starts with Tallahassee, Columbus, Wichita, and Little Rock moving into the long-abandoned White House. They have become a family of sorts, with Columbus and Wichita functioning as a young couple, Little Rock as the kid, and Tallahassee as the older uncle. Little Rock, now a young woman, is bored stiff and eager to run off into the world and find her own boyfriend no matter what Tallahassee says, joined by Wichita after Columbus' marriage proposal makes her wonder if she's grown too attached to him. Wichita comes back after Little Rock does indeed meet the man of her dreams, a long-haired hippie named Berkeley who takes her to a pacifist commune called Babylon, and promptly ditches her. Unfortunately, while she was away, Columbus met a young, bubbly blonde named Madison while searching a nearby shopping mall. Putting aside her feelings regarding that turn of events, Wichita joins Columbus, Madison, and Tallahassee to go out and find Little Rock, and along the way stop at Graceland, because Tallahassee said so.
If I wanted an easy place to start with the problems I had with this film, I could just say Madison and be done with it. It was through no fault of Zoey Deutch, the actor playing her; I've seen her save bad movies like Vampire Academy and elevate good ones like Before I Fall on the strength of her performances. This makes it all the more baffling how the film completely wastes her on an obnoxious, one-note stereotype, one who was hinted at having far greater depth than she turned out to have. The entire joke about Madison is that she's a dumb, blonde, 2000s MTV reality show airhead who somehow managed to make it ten years through the zombie apocalypse, acting like a complete child throughout. Her defining character trait beyond that is that she lives in a large freezer, which has kept her safe this whole time. Watching her, I figured they had to be setting up a twist involving Madison, suggesting that she was hiding something from the other characters under a mask of stupidity. Was she seeking to rob them? Was she the advance scout for a group of cannibals seeking to kidnap them? Was she working for the remnants of the government holed up in a bunker somewhere, sent out to recover information from the White House? One especially intriguing idea that the film hinted at was that she might be a new breed of zombie, more intelligent and capable of passing for human. The moment it was mentioned that the zombies were evolving to be smarter and tougher predators, my mind immediately went to Madison, and not the generic "super zombies" that they ultimately went with. It would've been an obvious twist given how quickly I figured it out (or would have if the film had gone in that direction), but it would've given Deutch some fun material to play with beyond just "Paris Hilton minus the purse dog". But nope; not only does the film not find anything to do with her, it then brings her back after a fake-out death to continue to not find anything to do with her, thinking that her valley girl antics are funny enough.
This issue kept coming up in the back of my mind as the film progressed, that the film could've gone deeper with some of the gags. The White House setting of the opening act felt like it was building to a great punchline about the state of the world in 2019 and how we might all be better off living like Tallahassee and the gang, or maybe them searching the archives and figuring out the truth about JFK, 9/11, or aliens, but it didn't do anything with it beyond some cheap jokes about the Lincoln Bedroom, William Howard Taft's weight, and Tallahassee bringing some dignity to the Oval Office. The Babylon commune also felt less like a real setting and more like a plot device to get the characters moving. This would've been a great place to explore, seeing how a bunch of peace-and-love hippies managed to survive and thrive for ten years even though they've melted down all their guns. If the film really wanted to mock the shit out of The Walking Dead and its fixation on heavily-armed survivalists and warlords, you couldn't do much better than showing a group like this as the great winners of the zombie apocalypse. Unfortunately, their only purpose in the film is to make loads of hippie jokes. The sketch-comedy feel of the first film, filled with rapid-fire jokes held together by a thin thread of a plot, worked because the jokes were funny. Here, however, it felt like a merely decent episode of Saturday Night Live, still making me laugh my ass off when it hit but leaving me groaning when it missed, such that I could no longer ignore the weaknesses in the plot. Particular bad ones include a scene ripped off from Shaun of the Dead where Tallahassee and Columbus meet their dopplegangers (played by Luke Wilson and Thomas Middleditch), and a bit making fun of Uber and Lyft that went for the laziest possible jokes about it.
What saved this film and kept it watchable was the returning cast. Once again, you have four exceptionally talented actors who are all really good at comedy, and neither time nor Oscar nominations have dulled their ability and will to go for the big, broad, dumb laughs. Breslin's Little Rock has changed the most since the first film, but she capably sold Little Rock as a young woman chafing at the restrictions of the world she lives in. Eisenberg and Stone had a new dynamic to play around with as Columbus and Wichita in the form of unhappy lovers, especially after Wichita finds out about Madison, and while Harrelson's Tallahassee is still very much the same man he was in the first film, he does a great job with it. New cast member Rosario Dawson was sadly underused, but when she did show up as the mysterious Nevada, she stole the show and proved just as good at both kicking ass and getting big laughs as the main gang. Ruben Fleischer also seems to have learned a few new tricks behind the camera in the last ten years; the action felt better-shot than last time, with a lot more twists and big spectacle, and the gore felt meatier as well. For all I said earlier, this movie still works as a yuk-yuk, good-time zombie shoot-em-up in the vein of the Dead Rising games, now with the action taking place at famous landmarks like the White House, Graceland, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. When it comes to one of the most important facets of a comedy sequel, going bigger and badder while still delivering what people liked about the first, this film delivers with flying colors. I know I was never bored watching it.
The Bottom Line
This is really one for the hardcore fans of the original. The jokes aren't as good and the new additions to the formula can get annoying, but what worked about the first film is still here, and if you wanna step into a time warp to a 2009 multiplex, this movie is your ticket. It sure beats a lot of other comedy sequels (looking at you, Hot Tub Time Machine 2).
Oh, and the mid-credits bonus scene was an excellent call-back.
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