Zombieland

(Movie Review)

Yet another film that came out while I was in Japan, so I missed a lot of the buzz surrounding it. (Sorry if I'm beginning to sound like a broken record on that point).

As with a lot of sleeper hits from back home, I heard about this mainly from word of mouth. I started to hear a lot of references to this film before I really knew what it was. And eventually some of my friends in Japan got ahold of a pirated version, and watched it one night. I wasn't there, but they told me about it afterwards. (They all recommended it very highly to me.)

I, however, was a little bit confused. "Wait, it's a zombie movie, but a comedy? Haven't we already done that with 'Shaun of the Dead'? Is this just a rip-off of that?"

No one was really able to give me a straight answer on that one. Yes, kind of, but the tone of the two films is a lot different, was the general consensus.

After seeing this film so highly praised on this amateur review video (link here) I decided to check it out.

I was, unfortunately, largely disappointed with this. Maybe it had just been built up too much for me. I don't know.

It's been a few years since I've seen "Shaun of the Dead", so I'm slightly worried about relying on my memory for this one. But from what I remember, it was a completely irreverent comedy. More or less everything was played for a laugh, including the scenes with the Zombies themselves. You had the two guys arguing over what records to throw as the Zombies bared down on them. And you had Ed, the friend who refused to take the whole Zombie invasion seriously.

This movie, on the other hand, reminded me a lot more of a typical teen movie, only with Zombies added. (Perhaps I'm just noticing the difference between an American comedy and a British comedy).

It had a lot of humorous parts, sure. The opening narration, when Columbus was explaining his rules, was pretty funny. And they way those rules kept popping up on screen at appropriate moments throughout the movie was also pretty funny.
And some of the conversations the characters would have also got me chuckling.

But my big problem with this movie is that, like a typical teen movie, they tried to make me care too much about the characters. And this is where I had a lot of problems.

Most of the things the characters did in this movie made no sense. And I could have put up with that if the movie had been just one cheap excuse for a laugh (a la "Shaun of the Dead"). But when the movie is trying too hard to make me care about these characters, then it really bugs how stupid those girls were. And how they kept getting in trouble by doing stupid things, and then having to be rescued.
(In that respect, they were not so much real characters so much as plot devices. Which again, I could have put up with if this movie were all about cheap laughs. But we were also supposed to care about the relationships these characters had with each other, and that I just couldn't do).

To sum up: don't get me wrong, this movie had its moments. And I think I would have been a lot more impressed if this had been the first time someone had ever gotten the idea of playing a zombie Apocalypse for laughs.

But because "Shaun of the Dead" already used that idea (and only a few years ago), this movie struck me as largely unimpressive.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky on Zinn, Haiti, Iran

Zombieland: Movie Review (Scripted)