Zombieland: Doubletap

You Might Want To Put Down Your Milk-Duds For This One...
or
"If You Love Someone, You Should Shoot 'Em in the Face So They Don't Become a Flesh-Eating Monster."

"Hey! Welcome to Zombieland: Chapter Two!" Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) chirps at the beginning of Zombieland: Doubletap, the sequel to the hit Zombieland from way back in 2009. "Thanks for waiting!"

Sure thing, Jess.' Sorry what happened to your career in the meantime.

It's great he came back, so that everyone could appreciate what an eccentric live-wire performer he is, given the right part, and how he can energize a movie just by being in it. But, then, Z:D in an exercise in precise nostalgia. 

Precise because the things that were established in the first go-'round are repeated: Columbus' "Rules" with their accompanying intrusive 3-D graphics, the credit-scattering Main Title montage, the "Bill Murray" cameo—wait until the very last frame on this one—the splintering of the group and the third act brightly lit night-time zombie-splatter orgy are all in place, just like you remember. That's some comfort food among the grisly fare.

But, also the Zombieland teams are back, the ones both in front of* and behind the camera. That Emma Stone (again playing "Wichita") turned down a big movie to return to the franchise says a lot about her affection for the filmmakers and the actors involved, as her star has risen considerably since that time, even winning an Oscar for La La Land. That says something.

My own reaction to the first Zombieland was an admiration for its fresh take on the well-chewed zombie concept. It helped that the characters in the film are a bizarre family of out-casts who probably wouldn't have anything to do with each other if the world hadn't gone to dead people who want a piece of your mind. 

Things haven't changed that much since the zombie apocalypse, other than that Darwin's theory seems to keep working on walking corpses. Either that or the winnowing of zombies makes typing the remaining ones that much easier. What is most troubling is that there are some strata that are tougher to kill, making them tougher to knock down than, say, Star Wars storm-troopers. There aren't many, but it would seem that late-model zombies need more than a simple double-tap to take them down. It doesn't make logical sense, but it does have a tendency to stretch out some of the splatter-fests to be more marathons than short sprints. It's all well and good to increase the challenges to the main characters, but it kind of goes off the proverbial cliff in the third act when the numbers start to increase. 

For the four main characters, the issue centers around the wishes of  Columbus to impart some stability on their rag-tag band of zomb-busters. He wants to establish a home, as the four—Tallahassee (Harrelson), Columbus, Wichita (Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin)—have already established a loose-knit family and their identities (they're still following the "no names" rule) are based on their home-towns. So, where's home when society has completely broken down? Well, in the United States, they set up shop at The White House (or "Casablanca" as Tallahassee calls it).That's good for awhile, and everybody gives it a shot. But, we're talking about four alpha-wolves trying to live together in peace and harmony: Tallahassee tries to be a father-figure, Wichita and Columbus try to be a couple—even if she's leery of settling down—and Little Rock is just tired of being around old people and wants to find friends (non-dead kind) her own age.

So, as in the first film, the group splinters—it's not like any of the members can't take care of themselves—sisters Wichita and Little Rock, feeling trapped and wanting freedom, take off, leaving "the boys" to their own devices, if both hurt by their desertion. Tallahassee also starts to feel a bit of wanderlust, wanting to go to Graceland, and Columbus, bitter over Wichita's leaving, runs into another survivor, Madison (a hilarious Zoey Deutsch), who is just as pink and girly-girl as can be. And...well, any port in the zombie-storm. She moves into the White House with Columbus and his "father" (as she calls Tallahassee, to his annoyance), and so, it's a little embarrassing when Wichita comes back to arm up, as Little Rock has run off with a namaste Berkeley pacifist (Avan Jogia)—this enrages Tallahassee ("It's not that I hate pacifists, I just wanna beat the shit outta them!").

So, the dynamic changes a lot. Wichita loathes Madison and despises Columbus for his quick rebound dalliance with somebody else...so..."Madison" after his previous matrimonial-bound devotion ("Wow...just...wow") and the four set off to find Little Rock as there is no way that she can defend herself with a pacifist in tow. With a little difficulty finding the proper vehicle to do their road-trip, they start to track down Little Rock by following the lead where she wants to go—that being Graceland, former domicile of Elvis "The King" Presley. 

When they get there, they are disappointed—Graceland is in ruins. But, nearby, they find the stolen Tallahassee-mobile, the Beast, parked outside an Elvis-themed shrine called the Hounddog Hotel. Little Rock had been there. But, exploring the place, they find that though they were there, they've left. But, they're not alone. Fearing they're about to be overrun by zombies, they find themselves assaulted by the Hotel's caretaker, Nevada (Rosario Dawson) to whom Tallahassee is instantly attracted. 

It's reciprocated, but then, maybe Nevada is reminded of somebody else—like her current squeeze, a western ruffian named Albuquerque (Luke Wilson), who...kinda...reminds you of Tallahassee and, actually, reminds everybody of Tallahassee, except for (of course) Tallahassee, who takes an instant dislike to the man. And—to make the conceit even more precious, Albs (please don't make me spell it again!) has a nervous, nerdish compadre named Flagstaff (Thomas Middleditch), who Columbus thinks is a really-together guy...with his commandments instead of rules and his unlikely skills at zombie-dispatching. As if knowing they've gone a little too far with the doppelganger bit, the two get eliminated fairly quickly. 

There's nowhere the two could go, anyway, it's a silly conceit and the jokes wear out their welcome pretty quickly...plus it eliminates a rival for Nevada's affections and she's pretty necessary to the plot, as everybody moves on to find Little Rock, who has been persuaded by "Berkeley" to find a mythical place called "Babylon," an oasis in the zombie-desert, where there is nothing but peace and harmony and hacky-sack, and no weapons—you just know that that is where the last confrontations in the movie are going to take place, like the big amusement park set-piece in the first one: it raises the stakes for the heroes and gives them a handicap, as well. But, it provides little suspense and hardly any danger. You know that everybody's going to come out of it alright, no matter how much danger is pretended.

Yes, it's fun, more in the smaller moments than in the large ones: you have a lot of really good actors who are enjoying playing their characters, even if they all could be playing better roles, and their idiosyncratic performances are always a pleasure to watch. They manage to evoke pleasure out of recycled materials and make fresh conceits that are beyond their sell-by date. If another Zombieland is made, one knows where it will go—splintering the group again and reforming them with a third act action set-piece. And, no doubt, they'll be just as good even though the vehicle itself will have become as charmless as an animated corpse.

* Zombieland: Doubletap's trailer makes comedic hay of the fact that Harrelson, Eisenberg and Breslin are all Oscar nominees and that Stone is an Oscar winner, juxtaposed with shots of them firing all sorts of weaponry. Hey, Helen Mirren rocks a machine-gun.

Zombieland

There are a lot of new movies I've seen and reviews are coming up, slowly but surely. Patience.

Written at the time of the film's release...

"Woulda...Coulda...Shoulda."

The University of Florida, being on a pan-handle with nowhere to run, was recently thoughtful enough to include in their on-line instructions dealing with hurricanes and pandemics, a section on what to do in case the area was attacked by zombies, or as they put it, "life-impaired individuals."

The section was quickly expunged.

Some folks have no sense of humor.

It's a good thing Zombieland does. Ruben Fleischer's zombie comedy has traded knife-sharp horror timing for sledge-hammer comedy timing, and the results are giddy, gory ghastly fun. At some point, the gangly slavering zombies just become targets and rarely are posed as threats and become merely a means to many grisly perforated punch-lines. The result of a fast-food outbreak of mad cow disease ("then mad human, then mad zombie" relates the film's geeky narrator "Columbus"), the flesh consuming zombies pass on the disease to their victims, and so on, ad nauseum.* 

Our narrator is on a one-man trek from his college room in Austin, Texas to try to find his parents in Columbus, Ohio, dodging zombies who are fast, but not very bright (at one point, he evades them by just running around a deserted parking lot in a circle, while they slavishly chase him like...zombies). Walking the highways with his carry-all on wheels he meets up with another fellow human, a rough-neck, well-armed and driving a Cadillac Escalante, and they pool their resources, conditionally. 

"No names" is the rule, so they call each other by their home-towns: "Columbus" (Jesse Eisenberg—combine Michael Cera with Hugh Grant's stammering timing and that's him) and "Tallahassee" (Woody Harrelson, who's extremely funny), and the film becomes an "armed-to-the-teeth" road-movie searching for the mythical "safe zone" that always seems to provide a goal for these movies.**

All the characters are smart (or dumb) enough and funny enough that everyone has their fair share of laughs. Ultimately, that's the final goal, along with a slice of relationship-therapy, as the movie can't come to any real resolution of the zombie problem (which would be...running out of bullets...or zombies). The best one can do is compromise on the "I wouldn't if you were the last (whatever) on Earth" as that's become an attainable goal.

It's a funnier movie than Shaun of the Dead, which gnawed on the same material, but Zombieland trades in its laughs for a Hollywood slickness that feels as if its going down well-worn storyline grooves of character resolution. The movie is given a seventh inning stretch by a gracious cameo by Bill Murray (no, really...he must owe Sony Pictures a movie) and wonderful graphic work, which solves the University of Florida problem by providing the "Columbus'" rules for dealing with zombies by pop-up graphics that regularly illustrate an example. As a public service, I provide them here:
Rule #1: Cardio ("the fatties" went first)
Rule #2: Double-Tap (don't trust the first shot)
Rule #3: Beware of bathrooms
Rule #4: Seat-belts (wear them)
(Here, things get a little sketchy)
Rule #7: Travel light
Rule #17: Don't be a hero
Rule #18: Limber Up
Rule #22: When in doubt, know your way out
Rule #31: Check the back-seat
Rule #32: Enjoy the little things

* And one would think "ad internecionem." Since these zombies are flesh-eating, that would mean that a lot of the zombies are missing limbs and would make lousy zombies, and eventually, well, supply and demand being what it is...wouldn't they basically eat themselves to extinction? In the words of "Tallahassee:" "Pretty soon life's little Twinkie gauge is gonna go empty." But I digress...


** The movie has such a fun time dealing with zombie and movie cliche's that it even addresses the issue:
Columbus: You know there's a place untouched by all this crap?
Tallahassee: Out east, yeah?
Columbus: Yeah.
Tallahassee: Out west, we hear it's out east, out east they hear it's out west. It's all bullshit. It's like you're a penguin at the North Pole hears the South Pole is real nice this time of year.
Columbus: There are no penguins in the North Pole.
Tallahassee: (pause) You wanna feel how hard I can punch?