Thursday, January 28, 2010

Zombieland *




There are things that I want out of life. I want to go sky diving. I want to have a child. But first I must get Zombieland out of my head. Here we have a movie that is so devoid of anything resembling entertainment that we wonder why this movie got made at all.
The movie stars Jesse Eisenberg as Columbus, one of the only humans left alive after a plague has started turning people into zombies. Along his travels he meets Tallahassee (Woody Harelson)- the characters all refer to themselves by the city they are from because they do want to give to much away- who gets a rush killing zombies and is on the lookout for whatever Twinkie he can get his hands on. In a movie like this, the filmmakers believe that by adding a simple thing like Tallahassee's search for Twinkies that this counts as character development, but it just some small stupid thing added to the movie.
Columbus and Tallahassee meet two girls (Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin) who are also on a journey. They want to go to an amusement park. This is just what I would want to do if the world was overcome with zombies, go to an amusement park. This is another idiotic plot device that the script doesn't know what to do with.


Zombieland is labeled as a comedy, but I didn't laugh much. The characters do and say things that are clever, but almost nothing funny happens in this movie. I say "almost" because there is a cameo late in the movie that is pretty funny, but it sticks out like a sore thumb from the rest of the movie. The scene is almost it's own contained scene and seems like it doesn't belong here.
There have been many zombie comedies that have come before Zombieland, the best being Return of the Living Dead and Shaun of the Dead. These movies took the zombie genre and turned it on it's ear. Zombieland doesn't even try to do anything with the zombies. You take zombies out of the equation and you are left with a pointless road movie. Zombieland is a boring, uneventful, ugly, and overall stupid movie in search of one thing that zombies love- a brain.

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