I'm a zombie nut from way back. I grew up watching Romero's Dead Trilogy, and re-watching it, and analyzing it and eventually making it highschool English thesis project. I've thought long and hard about the ins and outs of this horror scenario as created by the legend Romero, and copied endlessly ever since. As a zombie nut, I eagerly anticipate new entries into the genre, and yet oddly enough, Zombieland isn't a film directed towards me or my kind.
Zombieland is a horror-comedy that would much rather be a comedy and as a result neglects the horror element to such a degree that it completely recedes into the background and almost disappears. The movie's not called Funnyland, so I don't think the fact that it's a comedy excuses it from failing to develop the horror base with which to launch its jokey premise. When you put the word "zombie" in your title, you create a certain expectation. When you follow "zombie" with "land" your viewers are naturally going to expect to see a land full of zombies, not a bunch of two-shots of people exchanging snarky barbs without a care in the world. To this end, Zombieland feels like a quick cash-in on the zombie-craze, and not an entry made by people with any particular affinity for the genre.
Zombieland's premise is pretty simple, in fact, I can almost guess the elevator pitch used to sell it to the studio: "Woody Allen and Woody Harrelson from Natural Born Killers team up to survive the zombie apocalypse". When you say it like that, it doesn't sound half bad. And it isn't bad, it's just not that good either. It starts off with a super stylized, super slo-mo credit sequence of zombie attacks, which ends up looking like a Korn video directed by David Fincher. It's pretty, I must say, but the zombie action kinda peaks there. This eye-catching credit sequence (set to Metallica I think) hypes you up for a balls-to-the-wall blood fest, but unfortunately the movie never delivers on this promise. It's not that Zombieland doesn't do anything right, it certainly generates some laughs in spots and has its fun with film speeds, but all the jokes and slo-mo in the world can't make up for an almost total lack of story.
Jesse Eisenberg, the actor standing in the hunched, thin shadow of Michael Cera, plays the young Woody Allen-ish phobia-nerd who teams up with Woody Harrelson's more mellowed version of the gun-toting psychopath he played Natural Born Killers. It's the kind of unlikely pairing that movies are made of, and it clicks for the most part. When this duo encounters grifter sisters played by Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin, they become a survivalist team facing down the apocalypse. The problem is that none of these characters really develop past their one-line descriptions and the apocalypse in question seems like an afterthought and doesn't really appear to be too tough to survive. There isn't enough conflict or excitement and the characters in the middle of it aren't all that interesting so all your left with are the jokes.
I'd say Zombieland is a 60/40 split between funny and not funny. Eisenberg's phobia's in the face of extinction count towards the 60, and offer something unique to the genre--an explanation for why a certain type of person might be predisposed towards surviving. However, Woody's endless bleating about twinkies becomes a dead horse joke that the film beats into the unfunny 40% split and is evidence of when the films sense of humour dips. Oddly enough, the most talked about thing in the movie is the surprise cameo of Bill Murray. It's cute and knowing, but this joke takes up around 20 minutes of screen time and that's another long stretch of zombie-less inaction that helps to sink this movie as a horror-comedy. In this cgi-driven era I fully expected Zombieland to break out the wideshots, bubbling with hundreds of digital undead extras. The fact that such a shot never appears is a somewhat shocking ommission. Where are the fucking zombies, where is the action? A final siege at an amusement park is underwhelming and too-little-too-late.
As a Friday night rental, you could do a lot worse than Zombieland. But if it seems like I'm maybe riding this movie a little too hard, its because I think genre entertainment on the whole has taken a huge nosedive over the last decade and Zombieland is yet another film that fails to capitalize on a premise that actually doesn't seem all that hard to nail. Shaun of the Dead is an obvious reference for this film, but it's not nearly as funny and definitely not reverent of the genre enough to connect with horror nerds. Return of the Living Dead manages to deal in black humour without ever losing sight of its horror roots. Zombieland doesn't really have an excuse.
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