Just a great flick

Rating: Null/10 (26 September 2004)

This is one of those ideas that is so obvious you end up hitting your head, wondering why you didn't think of it yourself: combine 28 DAYS with the British genre that's most famous nowadays, "overgrown adolescents learn to accept responsibility and get lives". In England, Shaun and his going-nowhere best friend are living lives of quiet desperation, until his girlfriend dumping him and, incidentally, a zombie uprising, causes Shaun to get a clue.
I really liked this. This is almost a perfect blend of humor and seriousness: some people have knocked the film for this but I think it's just right, so much so that I actually got a little misty-eyed toward the end of the movie, and I can't say I've done that with any other release this year. Particularly funny is Shaun's early cluelessness during the outbreak.
The movie does post-modernism proud, as it's both a play on genre conventions and a celebration of them: this is an extremely tough thing to pull off, but they manage to do it with style. Because it's mainly a riff on established conventions, not something unique, the movie does suffer from a certain diffuseness: early on it looks like the theme will be "modern society creates zombies by itself" ala DAWN OF THE DEAD, but that soon gets abandoned, for instance, as there's too much other stuff to refer to. Still, the characters believe in what they're doing absolutely, which helps a lot in these sorts of things. Jokes aren't funny if the deliver is sniggering as he delivers them.
This is the sort of thing KILL BILL was trying to do: I liked those movies but they never really congealed into more than the sum of their parts, the way this did. SHAUN OF THE DEAD is essentially a goof, an inside joke (in some ways the definition of post modernism) but it's a very good example of it. Highly recommended.