It's Funny As Long As Someone Gets Hurt

Rating: 5/10 (11 March 2008)

"Shaun Of The Dead" has been dubbed a "zom-rom-com", meaning a romantic comedy featuring zombies. Yet it really works only in terms of the zombies, and there less on its own merits than in the way it channels famous past films about the undead. It was amusing, at times impressive, but never engaging.
Shaun (Simon Pegg) works a London electronics store, his life as dull and pointless as any other in his sad city. His main problem is reconciling his responsibilities with girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield) with his other long-term relationship involving layabout buddy Ed (Nick Frost).
"Things will change, I promise," Shaun tells Liz. He soon discovers how right he is, after bumping into assorted people with shuffling walks, dead-eyed stares, and a tendency, as Shaun's mother puts it, to get "a bit bitey".
Written by Pegg and director Edgar Wright, "Shaun Of The Dead" is less a send-up than a celebration of the zombie-film culture, playing the comedy less in the manner of a Mel Brooks spoof and more in a way that respects the whole notion of zombies appearing in one's world, attacking loved ones. The laughs come as much from Shaun and Ed's deadpan reactions, and the film's way of teasing the audience with allusions both to other zombie films and to the British television work of the film's stars.
That's too many in-jokes for me, not to mention a singular lack of charisma by any of the film's principals. If not as deliberately off-putting as the work of other British comedians like Sasha Cohen and Ricky Gervais, there's a strong whiff of au currant kitchen-sink misery to "Shaun" that deadens a lot of the pleasure to be had. Ironically, "Shaun" was shot in part at Ealing Studios, making it an Ealing comedy, though of a different kind than Alec Guinness would have known.
But that's my cultural take, from someone admittedly not a part of that culture. I'm over 40, and this film was not made for me. Fair enough. Does "Shaun" work on its own terms? At times.
Mostly, it works as a fairly involving zombie film with real violence and some comic relief. Not as lovable as "Return Of The Living Dead" or as clever as "Evil Dead 2", it nevertheless keeps things moving and has a good narrative arc all the way to the final big scene, a showdown at Shaun's favorite bar that rivals the Alamo sequence in "Saving Pvt. Ryan" for desperate intensity. There, the three principals and their companions must stave off a wave of zombies, and the build-up gives otherwise lame ideas like a pool-cue beatdown in time to Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now" a real lift.
If only I cared enough about the characters to fret over their horrible fates. Good zombie films manage some emotional remove, and "Shaun" does, too, but that works too often at the expense of the "rom" and the "com". Pegg and Ashfield play well off one another, and there's a fine turn by Bill Nighy as Shaun's unloved father-in-law, but I quickly tired of Ed and found myself at times bemoaning the zombies' slow-footedness.
An okay movie that could have been better, "Shaun" works at times on its own self-referential terms. But when people weren't getting killed, I wasn't laughing. That's a strange thing to have to say about a comedy.