Zombieland is Ruben Fleischer’s first foray into feature films, along with writer team Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick. So surprised was I by this that I had to check a couple of times to see that no, other than sharing a main character played by Jesse Eisenberg, Zombieland had nothing to do with 2009’s earlier indie comedy Adventureland (2009).
Eisenberg plays social recluse Columbus, whose talents with resource management computer games and constant fear of the outside world has caused him to successfully survive a particularly virulent plague that turns ordinary people into ravenous cannibalistic zombies due to his adherence to a set of rules. Travelling to Columbus in Ohio, he runs into sadistic cowboy badass Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson on career defining form); who agrees to shepherd him part of the way on his journey.
%movie(40543) Despite the claims of many critics, zombie films and comedy have always gone hand in hand; going back to the original Dawn of the Dead (1978), where grey faced corpses stumbled up escalators and into the blades of helicopters, leading to the later gory excesses of Peter Jackson’s genre defining Braindead (1992) and Sam Raimi’s controversial bloody slapstick horror comedy Evil Dead 2 (1987).
Recent examples such as the sublime Shaun of the Dead (2004) chose to make the stumbling slow zombies of Romero’s Dead trilogy figures of fun: notable in the scene where the two main characters are able to flick through a whole album collection whilst the shambling flesh eaters get ever so slowly nearer. Zombieland however chooses to adopt the ferocious running zombies of films like 28 Days Later (2002) and Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead (2007); and rather than the zombies themselves being the basis for the comedy, though they frequently are, the majority of the laughs comes from the interaction between the two main protagonists, plus the two girls who join the team and have a tendency to hijack Columbus and Tallahassee’s plans.
Whilst not an absolute laugh riot, Zombieland is not without its charm, as the male half of the cast at least are extremely enjoyable opposites; two halves of a personality split into two separate people dealing with the same horrific situation. The two girls are enjoyable enough, but despite the satisfactory performances by the undeniably beautiful Emma Stone and an oddly placed Abigail Breslin; the problem seems to lay in the scriptwriting as the two girls’ hijinks quickly begin to grate, and one begins to wonder why Tallahassee and Columbus bother to help them. Zombieland is an extraordinarily high concept indie-dysfunctional-family film with a helping of zombies thrown into the mix: the zombies, as is tradition, double for the unknowing masses of the public, consuming media fed to them like bleeding flesh. Fun and kinetic, Zombieland runs for a refreshingly short eighty seven minutes and remains slick and enjoyable throughout.
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