Zombieland
Pesky, entrails-munching zombies love to bring the apocalypse with them wherever they go and their desire for earthly destruction is put to effectively comedic use in the enjoyable splatterfest Zombieland. The story begins smack dab in the middle of the zombie takeover, but thanks to the dry narration courtesy of protagonist Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), we learn that only a few survivors are left and that the United States of America has been reduced to a pile of zombie-infested rubble. Really, what more do you need to know? The words 'zombie apocalypse' pretty much say it all, so writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick and director Ruben Fleischer wisely waste no time getting to the funny stuff.
The plot is about as thin as zombie flick plots can get (evidently, pretty thin), but zombie movies are not usually built on twists and deeply convoluted narratives. This is a tale of post-apocalyptic survival, of a world overrun with disgusting slobs who can doom your existence with a single bloody bite. It may only be a flesh wound, but you're still mere minutes away from joining the army of the living dead. Trying to survive such a terrifying and inescapable ordeal proves to be a huge challenge for most people, but Columbus, a self-professed loner who spent most of his young adult life at home playing computer games, has devised a rather brilliant set of rules to keep himself alive.
These rules, which include such important lessons as staying physically fit (so you can outrun zombies) and fastening your seatbelt, continually appear throughout the movie as three-dimensional signs floating in mid-air. The use of the onscreen text offers an eye-catching visual effect and simply adds to the movie's comedic spirit. The rules prove to be quite useful in many cases, even if Columbus is alone in praising their importance.
Along his journey, he meets a rough and tough zombie killer with an affinity for Twinkies (Woody Harrelson). The pair reluctantly team up and create a zombie-murdering odd couple. Harrelson's character is referred to as Tallahassee (each of the few human characters are affixed names according to their home town) and he approaches the job of destroying zombies as a sort of disgusting art form. This means that Harrelson gets to gleefully appear in several scenes that involve all sorts of zombie killing with a variety of potentially dangerous weapons.
Two young sisters, played by Abigail Breslin and Emma Stone, eventually round out the cast and give Columbus a reason to provide the movie with an obligatory romantic subplot. The love story never manages to find any emotional traction and so it feels unnecessarily shoe-horned into the movie. Additionally, while the four main characters are engaging enough to make me happily join them on their journey, I never cared greatly for any of them, a misstep that fails to justify the movie's occasional dips into sentimental territory.
But with Zombieland, it all comes back to the laughs. The cast is comedically competent and the script fills the empty expanses of narrative wasteland with an unending shower of humorous moments that greatly pleased the zombie fan in me. There are plenty of jokes that feel entirely at home in a zombie survival movie and a handful of moments are downright hilarious. Reese, Wernick and Fleischer have all done a good job of dissecting the zombie genre and finding the funny at its fleshy centre. Despite its flaws, Zombieland succeeds as a very funny movie with a slick attitude and a lot of gleeful gore. It knows its audience and everyone involved is clearly having a blast bringing all of the zombie mayhem to life. Buried underneath all of the blood, guts, and Twinkies is a very enjoyable movie that can make us all revel in the glory of surviving the zombie apocalypse.
