‘Zombieland’ leaves you hungry for more
Zombie preparedness is an increasingly controversial subject. Yesterday, for example, the University of Florida discarded its emergency plan for dealing with just such an outbreak. I only hope they’re ready for a mountain of liability when their campus is overrun by the undead and no one has any idea which exit to use.
Zombieland stars Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin as a motley crew of survivors in the zombie apocalypse. That’s a winning formula any way you slice it. But although it’s consistently fun, Zombieland only really succeeds when it breaks free from convention and greets us with the unexpected.
In voiceover narration that teeters on excessive, Columbus (Eisenberg) gives us the rundown on where things stand, and how he’s managed to survive. The key to his success? Isolation. In post-apocalytic times as tough as these, no one wants to get too close.
So when Columbus first encounters Tallahassee (Harrelson), he refuses to learn his name. Instead, they don monikers derived from their desired destinations. They team up for a ride, and before long they’re hornswoggled into chauffeuring con artists Wichita (Stone) and her younger sister, Little Rock (Breslin), on a road trip to a California amusement park.
Zombieland prevails on a lot of fronts. The performances are an unmitigated success, with the actors bringing a lot to their characters. There’s smart, clever dialogue in the screenplay by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, but they also ape genre conventions without dissecting them. It’s a stylish feature debut for director Ruben Fleischer, but even at a lean 81 minutes, Zombieland is also a little sloppy.
I winced when Wichita was reminiscing about seeing her first R-rated movie — Anaconda. But Anaconda is not rated R, and how hard is that to check? There’s also a scene toward the end of the film where one of the characters is wandering alone in a place for an unknown reason, attacked, not shown to escape, and then shows up fine in the next scene. We can assume this person escaped somehow, but it makes for bad continuity.
Still, I liked Zombieland. It’s a good time at the movies. And there’s an unexpected treat that I won’t spoil for you that elevates the movie to a higher plane of comedic joy. To quote Matt Singer for the second consecutive day, “The thing that I liked best about Zombieland — the thing EVERYONE’S gonna like best about Zombieland — is the thing you can’t talk about.”
P.S. Don’t miss Sir Critic’s take on Zombieland.
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