Terrible remake.

Rating: 2/10 (4 December 2004)

The original Dawn of the Dead was a commentary on society; and this remake is too. Only this time it's a commentary on the fact that attention spans are getting shorter. The zombies move at lightening pace and the film is edited together like something that you would expect to find on Mtv (the scenes set to music only reinforce this view). This is all wrong; zombies don't move fast, they're slow; and Dawn of the Dead is supposed to be a horror movie, not a quick-edited action fest. What's going on?! The original Dawn of the Dead also selected it's characters wisely, and made them all unique and interesting, but the remake suffers from what I like to call 'Alien 3 syndrome', which is where a film introduces masses of characters and forgets to make a single one of them interesting, rendering them all just pawns for the central monster to eat. Now while this is fun because most of them do get eaten, it sucks because there is no tension since you don't care about them anyway. Which makes for a pretty boring and repetitive movie really.
Ving Rhames replaces Ken Foree (who himself has a cameo) as the main character in the mayhem, and does a pretty good job with it. Rhames is a big man and he has a very cool look about him, so it's fun to see him shooting zombies. That's one of the only good things I have to say about the film. Starring alongside Ving is Sarah Polley. Sarah looks nice, and obviously has fun with the role; but doesn't really make an impression. The rest of the cast aren't worth a mention, with one exception; Matt Frewer. This guy is one of my favourite smaller actors, but he's in the film for all of about five minutes. Damn. The main reason why the cast isn't able to impress is that they simply don't serve any relevance to the plot at all, rendering the human drama element null and void, and therefore making every moment without zombies incredibly boring. The film follows pretty much the same path that the original did with a bunch of people holding up in a shopping mall, only this time there's some attempt to escape. On the whole, for a film that supposedly depicts the falsity that remakes are a good idea, this film is a massive disappointment. There's so much that still could be done with the idea of zombies, in spite of the greatness of the original Dawn of the Dead, but this film hardly attempts to capitalise at all. There's some nice moments of carnage, but overall; this is an enormous disappointment.