“What do you think?” asks zombie killer Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) after blowing away the one remaining zombie in an abandoned storefront, “Zombie kill of the week?” This moment pretty perfectly encapsulates director Ruben Fleischer and Zombieland’s mission statement, and gives us the litmus test for whether or not you’ll enjoy the rest of the movie: If the idea of watching Woody Harrelson kill zombies in increasingly creative ways for roughly 90 minutes appeals to you at all, you’ll enjoy this film. It's such a simple concept that its hard to believe it hasn't been done before, and for fans of the genre, it's basically critic proof. Zombie movies have always been, to some extent, about seeing how creative the filmmakers can get with their kill scenes. Tom Savini and George Romero have gone so far to admit that some of the most memorable moments in Dawn of the Dead came about just because they were bored and had extra food at the craft services table. This is the first time, though, that I’ve seen a movie that made killing zombies its explicit purpose – and believe me, I’ve seen a shitload of zombie flicks.
What little plot the film has is of the basic road-movie/zombie film variety: a few random survivors of a zombie apocalypse try to make their way across the country to some kind of safe haven. We’ve got Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), a nerdy college student who manages to survive not through skill or even luck, but through an obsessive compulsive attention to detail. There’s Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), sister con artists who get by on their wiles alone. And, stealing the movie from all of them, there’s Woody Harrelson’s Tallahassee, a southern-drawling ultimate badass who seems to derive real joy from killing the undead. Harrelson plays the part as a variation on his role in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, except here we can root for him since he’s killing zombies and not people. The plot takes all sorts of winding detours, including a 15 minute middle section that contains no zombies at all, but makes up for it with one of the funniest celebrity cameos I’ve ever seen (which I won’t give away here, and shame on anyone who does - fuck you, Boston Phoenix/Roger Ebert). It’s not flawless – like a lot of zombie movies, this one relies on a third act where smart characters do very dumb things solely to keep the plot moving forward. Really though, this is just a movie that everyone clearly had a blast making, and for dumb, hilarious Halloween entertainment, it’ll be hard to top.
Coming Soon in Movies: Arguably the greatest movie ever to be filmed in Boston, Friends of Eddie Coyle, which I'll be rewatching at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge on Friday. If you live in Boston and you haven't seen it, GO! When's the last time you saw Robert Mitchum hanging around Boston and not just some homeless guy that looks kind of like Robert Mitchum?
(Poster image obtained via http://www.wikipedia.org)
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