Zombieland (2009) **½

     I never imagined myself saying this, but I think I’m kind of done with zombie movies. Oh, I’m not saying I’ll never watch another one, but for the foreseeable future, I’m going to want prior assurance from someone I trust that I’m not going to be wasting my time. Thinking about it now, I would probably have been better served by spending the last bit of my goodwill toward flesh-eating, animate corpses on Shaun of the Dead rather than Zombieland. But I don’t have what promises to be a Satanically awful softcore porn version of Shaun of the Dead taunting me from the depths of my “to be watched” pile, and that screener copy of Sean Skelding’s Stripperland isn’t going to review itself. I don’t like to review parodies of things I’m not familiar with, and so here we are.

     You all know the drill by now. Weird pandemic disease; victims rise from the dead as infectious, flesh-hungry monsters; civilization collapses; a handful of mutually mistrustful survivors struggle to carry on some semblance of life in the aftermath. In Zombieland, the plague is a mutant strain of bovine spongiform encephalopathy— or mad cow disease, if you’re averse to words of six syllables— which is a charmingly plausible notion that I don’t think I’ve seen used before. Meanwhile, the first survivor we meet is about the last person you’d ever expect to withstand an apocalypse, a timid, weak, asocial shut-in who spent the three weeks leading up to the end of the world playing video games in his apartment and chugging Mountain Dew Code Red (Jesse Eisenberg, from Cursed and The Village). His first clue that an unprecedented calamity was engulfing the world came when the “insanely hot” next-door neighbor whom he’d always been too chickenshit to talk to (Amber Heard, of Drive Angry and The Stepfather) started banging on his door and screaming about being attacked by a homeless man. Evidently when the girl from apartment 406 said “attacked,” what she really meant was “bitten;” halfway through the night, Miss Insanely Hot started turning green, puking blood, growling like a rottweiler, and chasing our hero around his flat at 28 Days Later… speed. He’s still very sorry about bashing her head to a pulp with the lid to the toilet tank, but you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, right? That was some months ago. Now the boy in unit 408 has taken it upon himself to see if there’s anything left of the world he knew, starting with his old home town of Columbus, Ohio. It’s going to be a long walk from Dallas, but see above RE: what you’ve got to do.

     Not long after setting off, he encounters a half-crazy NASCAR fanatic in a Lord Humungus-ized Cadillac Escalade (Woody Harrelson, from Bay Coven and The Hunger Games). After staring each other down for a while with guns drawn, the pair decide to team up for as long as they can stand each other. Escalade Guy has a rule against forming attachments in this blighted world, so he insists upon neither one of them revealing their true names. Since the kid is going to Columbus, while he himself is bound for Tallahassee, Florida, Escalade Guy decrees that they shall henceforth be known to each other as Columbus and Tallahassee.

     Tallahassee has a weird obsession. The man loves Twinkees, and since he’s pretty sure nobody’s making them anymore on account of the whole “the dead walk the Earth devouring the flesh of the living” thing, he’s hell-bent on finding and eating at least one more of the nasty little cake-travesties before his time runs out. (Don’t you just love an accidental prophecy? Who would have guessed in 2009 that real-world Twinkee-lovers would temporarily be facing much the same situation in just three years, no apocalypse necessary?) Between his quest for junk food and the fact that Columbus has both spastic colon and the bladder of a nine-year-old girl, they end up stopping at a lot of supermarkets, gas stations, and convenience stores. Naturally that opens them up to zombie attack with a frequency that violates pretty much every one of Columbus’s 31 rules of survival, but it’s okay, because Tallahassee is the motherfucking John Rambo of zombie-killing. Ironically, the threat they can’t overcome turns out to be a harmless-looking twenty-ish girl (Emma Stone) and her tweenage sister (Abigail Breslin, from Ender’s Game and Signs), who bamboozle the guys out of their guns and their vehicle with a con about the kid needing to be euthanized for a zombie bite.

     The lads enjoy a compensating stroke of good luck on a nearby residential street, where the carport of one abandoned house yields a fully gassed-up Hummer H2, stocked with a veritable arsenal of guns and ammunition. (“Thank God for rednecks!” Tallahassee exclaims, knowing whereof he speaks.) Thus equipped (albeit under protest from Columbus), the pair reverse course, and race off in the direction they last saw the girls who waylaid them heading. Inevitably, that leads only to them being waylaid a second time. Now, however, the girls decide not to let their two-time suckers out of their sight, which seems a reasonable line to adopt toward people who were trying to hunt you down. Even so, the close confines of the Hummer soon produce an uneasy truce. Tallahassee dubs the older girl Wichita and the younger Little Rock, apparently on a different operative theory from the guys’ handles, since Wichita and Little Rock weren’t going to either of those places. Rather, they’re bound for Los Angeles, site of the Pacific Funland amusement park. Both girls have fond memories of the park, but more importantly, rumor has it that it’s completely free of zombies even now. Tallahassee has heard that about enough places that he doesn’t believe it for a second, but what the hell? They’ve got to go somewhere, after all. From then on, Zombieland turns into something resembling an extremely strange romantic road-trip comedy, with the emphasis less on survival than on the process whereby the travelers learn how not to become the kind of self-destructive, backstabbing idiots who populate most post-Romero zombie movies.

     Zombieland is inoffensive and mildly amusing, but ultimately no more than that. Jesse Eisenberg’s Columbus plays like a less irritating version of the title character in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and has good odd-couple chemistry with Woody Harrelson’s Tallahassee. Emma Stone doesn’t have as much to work with here as she does in, say, Easy A, but this film does nothing to endanger her status as my favorite comic actress of her generation. Abigail Breslin gets the best moment in the whole movie, an extemporized bit in which Little Rock attempts to explain Hannah Montana to an incredulous Tallahassee. The top-secret celebrity cameo works well enough, but isn’t sufficiently grounded in the specific star’s personality to make as much impact as it was supposed to; anybody at that level of fame could have been substituted without changing much of anything. Come to think of it, the same might be said of Zombieland as a whole. A minimum of tinkering would render this script compatible with any end-of-the-world scenario that included a concrete enemy for the survivors to hide from, flee from, and fight: vampires, aliens, atomic mutants, biker gangs, doomsday preppers, whatever. I prefer my parodies to be more narrowly tailored than that.

Home     Alphabetical Index     Chronological Index     Contact