With a $25 million dollar opening this weekend, Zombieland demonstrates that there’s simply no substitute for showing people a good time.  Relatively short on plot and deep characterization, but long on charm, this postmodern zombie comedy hits all the right buttons and sends you back out into the world with a smile on your face, writes R. J. MacReady.

First let me start out by saying, this movie is not the American Shaun of the Dead.  It’s American.  There are zombies. But that’s pretty much it. Shaun of the Dead is actually a very richly layered comedy with zombies representing emotional or intellectual death by complacency rather than actual death by wildly infectious virus. Zombieland is more of an amusement park. Hence the title and the third act set in an amusement park.

And that’s not a bad thing.

Eddie Izzard has a great stand-up routine about the difference between American and European movies. In this routine he postulates that European movies feature people arranging matches.  American movies, however, take the basic premise of a European movie, explode the budget, throw in some space monkeys and a liberal use of the f-word, and sell a great deal more popcorn. So, perhaps in that sense, Zombieland is indeed the American Shaun of the Dead.  But the similarities end there.

The movie is really about Jesse Eisenberg’s character, Columbus. I’d compare him to Woody Allen (because that’s what pretty much everyone else is doing), but there’s never a moment where he expresses a desire to marry his Asian stepdaughter, so I don’t think the comparison is totally apt. 

He is, however, neurotic, and that has helped him survive.  He provides a narration throughout the movie, and for me, that’s really one of the drawbacks of the movie. Not the concept of narration, mind you, just the actor’s voice and the fact that he actually refers to the post-zombie-apocalypse world he lives in as "Zombieland." Dude, it’s not cute. I liked the movie better when I thought Zombieland referred to the theme park the characters were trying to get to at the end.

Anyway, Columbus, so named because that’s where he’s going, meets up with Tallahassee, played by Woody Harrelson, and the two form an unlikely bond. I say that entirely tongue in cheek. I’m fairly convinced that that’s the way it was written down or pitched. It’s a very likely bond. We knew they’d get along despite their differences, and even develop, dare I say it, a grudging respect for each other by the end of the movie.

They meet up with a love interest for Jesse, played by Emma Stone, and a surrogate daughter for Woody, played by Abigail Breslin. The girls are smarter than the boys because they are, of course, girls. Again, you can see the buttons being pressed as you watch. And there’s a lot of metal guitar riffs used to great effect (good use of Van Halen, Metallica, and White Stripes), so it hits all the right action notes.

Like I said, Zombieland is first and foremost a fun movie. There’s funny stuff. There’s gross stuff. Relationships are established because the moviemakers know that we, the audience, want the relationships to blossom. Maybe it’s because we think the actors are engaging. Maybe it’s because there’s enough in the script to make us think the actors are engaging.

But regardless, this movie does something that many movies these days fail to do. It tries to give the audience what it wants, and not necessarily in an exploitative way. There’s an obligatory intestine shot (just like there’s a car chase in every action film, there’s been an intestine shot in pretty much every zombie movie since Night of the Living Dead). But even though there’s gag about the "Zombie Kill of the Week," the filmmakers don’t go out of their way to come up with "creative" zombie kills. For example, despite the appearance of two chainsaws, you don’t see them used on a zombie. (I know, Chekov would’ve been furious.)

And the movie doesn’t overstay its welcome. It clocks in at a cool 81 minutes, just enough time to introduce our characters, set them on their journey, and resolve any differences in a climactic zombie shoot out.  Now, I didn’t laugh out loud at it as much as I did for the first Austin Powers movie or Ghostbusters, but I did laugh out loud at least once, and I didn’t stop smiling or check my watch. 

If there was a flaw, the movie could’ve been a little scarier to make the laughs bigger. The director, Ruben Fliescher, and writers, Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick, spent more time deconstructing all the tropes of zombie movies and not enough time developing tension. Sure, they probably were shooting for a comedy, but not all their jokes were killer. Using some of the weaker jokes as tension breakers might have made them funnier.

For example, the main character repeatedly lists his rules for survival throughout the movie, but the rules themselves aren’t terribly funny. However, when they show up in a moment of tension you can’t help but laugh. They could have used this technique in other areas, but chose not to.

If I were to hazard a guess at any social implications of the box-office success of the movie, I’d say that it taps into our anxieties of living in a fallen world. In addition, I know the whole post-9/11 thing has totally been played out, but I think there may be a little left in that toothpaste tube for this movie, based upon its setting. Unlike zombie movies that take place as the disaster is happening, this one takes place long after. Here there is no real hope that a cure will be found or that life will somehow return to normal if the characters can survive the night or get to X location.  Instead, the characters all struggle with how to relate to each other in this new environment, heightened trust issues and all.

And that’s really why Woody Harrelson’s character is such a hoot. Unlike the main protagonist who carries his own hand sanitizer, Harrelson’s Tallahassee is blissfully undisturbed by the new order of things. Indeed, he seems to thrive. In the end, Eisenbergs’ Columbus learns to be more stereotypically "manly" by the end of the movie, perhaps commenting on the sustained emasculation of the American male.

Nah.

The movie is a movie. It’s a piece of entertainment, and like Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, it just wants to be a good movie (though Romero’s movie wanted to scare you, this movie wants you to laugh).

You’ve wasted movie ticket money on worse movies. Why not check it out? And if not, see it on DVD.  It’s not the greatest movie ever, but it’s certainly fun enough that you can bet that it will be mentioned when people review the big screen adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road later this year.

Oh, and one extra note. A lot of folks call this a "road movie." For you Hope and Crosby fans, that’s kind of misleading.

On the one hand, there’s some similarity in that we’re taking the trip with the characters because we want to see the chemistry between the actors. In that sense, maybe it is like a Hope and Crosby movie. But on the other hand, not a lot happens on this trip. There’s no independent plot device for our characters to resolve other than figuring out that they want to travel together. So maybe it’s not very Hope and Crosby in that sense.

And I’m pretty sure Bob Hope never killed someone with a banjo, so that’s different too.

–R. J. MacReady