Zombieland review

Zombieland is the best kind of B-movie: the kind that knows full well that it's a B-movie. Pretty much everything about this flick exudes a big-hearted "slapped together for maximum fun" quality, right down to the casting of Jesse "Michael Cera was busy" Eisenberg and Woody "Matthew McConaughey was too expensive" Harrelson in the lead roles. And damned if Zombieland doesn't pull it off by making all the right choices: keeping the running time down to a drum-tight 80 minutes, keeping the non-zombie members of the cast down to the four leads and one priceless cameo (way too good to spoil here), not overselling the romantic subplot or lingering on the "dramatic" moments. Despite the shot I took at Eisenberg and Harrelson not two sentences ago, they do have a great dynamic here, and Woody in particular is obviously having the time of his life spewing one-liners as the badass killing machine Tallahassee (the characters are all named after their home cities because proper names would invite emotional bonding, a Zombieland no-no).

Probably the most impressive thing about Zombieland is it manages to be clever and fun despite the fact that zombies have basically been done to death cinematically. Zombieland actually doesn't even bother with the traditional horror elements of zombie cinema; it goes straight for action-comedy, milking the lead characters bonding under duress to sustain the narrative. This, of course, puts it in dangerous territory by inviting comparison to Edgar Wright's modern classic Shaun of the Dead, but that's really not what Zombieland is going for tonally and I didn't find myself making that mental comparison while watching it. Instead, Zombieland plays like a loose mash-up of the road-trip genre, Evil Dead 2, and Dead Rising, the great Xbox 360 game from 2006. Most of Zombieland's best moments come directly out of that playful spirit, like the awesome credit sequence (hyper slow-motion scenes from the zombie apocalypse soundtracked to Metallica's "For Whom The Bell Tolls") and the running gag of superimposing Jessie Eisenberg's neurotic character's rules for zombie survival on the screen at relevant moments.

Zombieland isn't going to rewrite the rules of genre movies, and it probably won't become a midnight movie classic (although it very well might), but it's so much fun that it's an easy recommendation. This is the type of movie best seen with a raucous audience in a crowded theater; the type you'll probably watch all the way through without really even intending to if you catch the opening of it when flipping through cable channels in a couple years. It'll put a smile on your face, and that's not an accomplishment to be taken lightly.

Also not an accomplishment to be taken lightly, the trailer for Legion, which played before Zombieland, made me think that I owe the makers of Law Abiding Citizen an apology.