Nothing like squeezing in some melody befor the zombies come — Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg in Zombieland.
Action comedy offers a perfect antidote to an overcrowded horror genre
More than 40 years after George Romero unleashed the zombie hordes the undead are still going strong. Vampires may be staking a claim as cinema’s favourite fiends but flesh-eating monsters are still so popular that it’s hardly surprising to see a comic action send-up of the genre like Zombieland . The fact that it’s really damned good on the other hand is as welcome a surprise as a hidden cache of weapons in a post-zombie wasteland.
Jesse Eisenberg plays Columbus (characters are only ever identified by the cities they’re trying to get to) a misanthrope whose natural fear and meticulous attention to his own rules for survival have kept him alive. (His rules are a collection of well-observed truths about the zombie genre — his answer to the inevitable run away from undead hordes: “Cardio” “Limber up” and plain ol’ cowardice — “Don’t be a hero.”)
It isn’t until he runs across his reckless redneck opposite in the character of mega-zombie-killer Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) that the dyed-in-the-wool loner begins to find any strength in numbers. The two eventually meet a pair of con ladies extraordinaire Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock ( Little Miss Sunshine ’s Abigail Breslin) and the quartet has to negotiate an uneasy alliance while fending off bile-spewing zombies.
In his feature-length debut director Ruben Fleischer delivers a comedy that uses a well-worn genre’s conventions to great effect. There’s a wild energy to the slickly executed film like an action set piece that sees Tallahassee using an amusement park as a tool for killing a mess of zombies or Columbus’s rules popping up in the background and the glee’s contagious. Co-writers Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese meanwhile provide a script that alternates between sly winks (a cameo by Bill Murray) and balls-out crude (Tallahassee beating a zombie to death with a banjo and exclaiming “You’ve got a purdy mouth!”). The jokes are wicked fun and the movie’s small cast pulls them off with charm.
Despite its action-comedy pedigree Zombieland is very compact. With a central cast of four and an odd dearth of overwhelming zombie mobs the film’s short run-time (less than 90 minutes) is just long enough. Harrelson blusters with scene-chewing goodness and while Eisenberg’s meek manchild might come off initially as an impression of Michael Cera he makes the role his own.
When it comes to rotting corpses that want to eat your brains sometimes it just feels good to laugh.
