Zombieland is a cool little film, most noteworthy for
hitting cinema screens on the tail-end of the great zombie craze of the 2000s.
I like to think of it as an exclamation point capping off that whole demented
era, before pop culture’s collective zombie fetishism finally started to inch
back from its rabid peak, to be partially eclipsed by the ongoing surge of interest
in supernatural romance spurred by the Twilight phenomenon. After years of
pulse-pounding gore-flicks and tense horror, and interminable water-cooler
debate and analysis, the makers of Zombieland pluckily decided to steer the
current social obsession with the flesh-eating living-dead into something weird
and fun and diverting, with engaging characters and an irrepressible energy
that you can’t help but chuckle at.
Zombieland was initially intended to be a TV show, and it
shows. It comes across like the extended pilot for a horror comedy, setting up
a regular cast of oddballs, hinting at further details to be unveiled of its
madcap world, and ending on a hopeful note implying many future adventures that
are yet to come (though the follow-up TV show is supposedly on its way at last,
in time to compete with The Walking Dead from the other end of the Seriousness
Spectrum). It’s no masterpiece, no definitive final statement on a worn-out
genre. It’s just a slick blast of silver-screen hijinks, with a memorable
quartet of Woody Harrelson’s outlandish, all-American zombie-killer, Jesse
Eisenburg’s oddly likeable hero-nerd, Emma “The New Hotness” Stone’s ultra-charismatic, totally non-disposable
love interest, and Abigail Breslin as Stone’s precocious younger sister and
partner in crime.
The zombie apocalypse setting is barely taken seriously; the
titular loping ghouls, while as bloody and grisly as any other incarnation in
the genre, are either absent or easily swatted for significant stretches of the
running time. The old staples of creeping dread, breathless fear, characters
being killed off one by one with shocking sticky finality; all thrown out in
favour of daft scenarios, zombie-killing as a fun sport, and a rather
self-indulgent cameo that sprawls lavishly across the half-way mark.
After so much doom and gloom, as a wretched decade sputtered
out in the unyielding jaws of long-term recession, some light-hearted mocking
of all the po-faced cinematic tragedy porn to come out of the zombie genre was
in order. For providing it with such aplomb, Zombieland should always have a
special place in our hearts.
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