Welcome to Zombieland (formerly the United States of America), where the human population has been reduced down to post-apocalyptic single digits but the comedy barometer is higher than it’s been in 2009, notwithstanding the morbid misanthropists who cackled as the sound and fury of Transformers 2 broke box office records.
No, this is not some woeful mockumentary about the anti-artistic number crunchers who read entrails to decide which remakes, reboots, or adaptations to next unleash upon an unwitting world (but maybe it’s necessary, since Barbie and Monopoly were recently announced as serious Hollywood properties queued for development).
In fact, Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland is exactly as advertised: on the one hand, it’s a road movie, a buddy movie, a rite of passage movie, a boy-meets-girl movie . . . on the other hand it’s two guys, and eventually two girls, shooting the heck out of an endless swarm of zombies.
Our putative buddies in this case are indie go-to man Jesse Eisenberg (AKA Michael Cera’s American doppelganger) and Woody Harrelson as Columbus and Tallahassee, respectively – in this future, people have taken the names of their respective cities since apparently there’s very little likelihood of meeting any duplicates.
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Zombieland
Directed by Ruben Fleischer |
Columbus is a neurotic loner, formerly a college student before the world came to an end, who has avoided being turned into a main course with a series of strict zombie survival rules including “beware of bathrooms,” “double tap” zombie targets when shooting, and “limber up.” He is an awkward, adolescent Woody Allen adrift in Zombieland. Tallahassee, however, is a living Rambo, an enthusiastic, wise-cracking zombie-slayer who consistently strives to achieve “zombie kill of the week.”
Without any real plans except for a doomed quest on Columbus’s part to visit home and see if his parents are alive, the two meet a pair of girls, Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), who’ve heard that an amusement park called Pacific Playland is supposedly zombie-free, and head for what they hope is the last bastion of humanity.
The zombies themselves haven’t changed much from their other incarnations: aside from an increase in speed and motor skills circa Y2K, our heroes have been fending off the same mindless, bloodthirsty drones since George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in 1978.
Indeed, with Survival of the Dead (Romero’s sixth entry in the “Dead” saga) unveiled at the Toronto International Film Festival only a month ago – to say nothing of 28 Days Later, I Am Legend, or the rest of the clones – we seem to be getting a lot of cultural mileage out of re-killing the undead.
Nevertheless, there is something singular and winsome about Zombieland’s pairing of Harrelson and Eisenberg against a backdrop of doggedly earnest bloodletting, even when tongue is firmly in cheek, and even, again, when both (zombie) tongue and cheek are riddled with bullets in balletic slow-motion. (Needless to say, if you don’t see any potential humour in the subject of zombie-killing, this won’t be your cup of tea.)
Until now, the zombie comedy arena has been ruled by Britain’s Shawn of the Dead, but Hollywood is back in the game. Eisenberg’s rules – which flash on-screen like Tarantino titles – are just one of a number of self-conscious cues to the audience that this film won’t be retreading old ground: it knows we’ve seen enough zombie movies already to fill in a backstory for ourselves, so it eschews an explanation altogether and jumps right into the fray. (You can almost hear a zombie gurgle: “Are you not entertained?”)
Hopefully, it will be enough to jumpstart the North American comedy back to life after 2009’s mediocrities mediocre season, which encompassed tired efforts from the regulars (Will Ferrell’s Land of the Lost; Jack Black’s Year One; Ben Stiller’s Night At The Museum sequel) and solid, completely unexpected, efforts that still fell a bit short of the ideal mark (17 Again; The Hangover).
Taken for what it is, Zombieland is a comedy stand-out: it is this year’s Tropic Thunder, and for what it’s worth, it features an even more indelible celebrity cameo than Tom Cruise’s overweight studio head.