A PG-13 zombie film for the masses

Rating: 5/10 (27 August 2014)

WORLD WAR Z is the largest-budgeted (190 million +) summer blockbuster- style film featuring zombies to date. According to Box Office Mojo, it is also by far the highest-grossing zombie film here in the U.S.; beating its closest competition ZOMBIELAND (2007) by well over 100 million dollars. Let's face it: hype sells tickets. Throw in a known A- List star and that's even more tickets. Quality doesn't even really matter at the end of the day as long as you have the funds to promote the hell out of something. Unfortunately for WWZ, all of the money, expensive PR, CGI effects, online-generate hype and star power in the world can't save this from being an average, by-the-numbers, utterly forgettable film with an ordinary screenplay. It also can't change the fact there have already been literally hundreds of zombie films made for a tiny fraction of what this film cost (many made well under 1 million dollars) that wipe the floor with this one in every way possible.
Brad Pitt (also one of the producers) stars as Gerry Lane, a retired UN operative who now enjoys staying home and making pancakes for his family. Aw, ain't he sweet? The open 25 minutes is centered around Pitt and his family's attempt to flee to safety once the zombie outbreak begins. These scenes are more-or-less rendered almost unwatchable thanks to the presence of Gerry's two irritating daughters. While pandemonium is erupting around them, these shrill little abortions take turns annoying us by 1. screaming repeatedly for their blanket, 2. taking off a seat belt during a high speed car ride and refusing to put it back on, 3. shrieking at the top of their lungs because they've dropped a stuffed animal, 4. gasping over an asthma attack and then being perfectly fine a scene later before even receiving medication, 5. wandering off in the middle of zombie attacks for no apparent reason. After a pit stop at an apartment building, Gerry uses his connections to get a copter lift to safety and thankfully wifey (Mireille Enos) and the girls are put on the back burner, having served their purpose of showing what an upstanding guy Gerry is. The film does briefly return to them a time or two to show things like one of the brat daughter's whining and complaining about the food and water they're being served. If this is the future, maybe a zombie epidemic isn't a bad thing after all.
Now on an overly-crowded Navy ship with limited supplies, Gerry is pretty much forced into accompanying a young Harvard virologist and a military unit to search for the cause and then possibly a solution to the zombie pandemic that is sweeping the globe. They fly off to South Korea first, where the scientist moronically ends up slipping and shooting himself in a panic, leaving superman, uh, I mean Gerry, to come up with a solution all on his own. He's then off to Jerusalem for a spell to a walled-in compound that's eventually invaded by zombies and from there it's a plane trip back to Europe that ends up crashing due to an outbreak on board. Conveniently it dumps him and his new Israeli one- armed commando female friend (Daniella Kertesz) within walking distance of the W.H.O., where Gerry must risk all to prove a theory he's come up with by observing the zombie behavior on his trip.
Fans of the novel this is supposedly based upon are likely going to be furious that this has next to nothing to do with the book. It's almost like they just wanted to use the snappy title and didn't really concern themselves with the story author Max Brooks had come up with at all. I know this had numerous production problems along the way, so maybe that played a part in the underwhelming finished product. Brooks' vision had the Romero-style slow-moving zombies that eat humans. Because this film just had to be PG-13, it changed the zombies from flesh-eaters to fast- moving 'infected' zombies who bite victims simply to spread the virus before moving on to someone else. Either way, they are not the least bit scary. In fact, often times they're unintentionally hilarious doing these exaggerated twitches, chomping their teeth, running around at about 60 MPH, leaping all over the place like overly-excited cats and creating these hilarious zombie stacks to ascend tall walls and buildings. The makeups are fine but forgettable and the CGI is fairly well-executed, but not well-executed enough to where much of this doesn't look cartoonish.
Though some of the action scenes are fairly exciting and well-done in a generic big budget kind of way, the only new mythos this adds to the mix are making these 'living dead' selective about who they kill and infect. Somehow the infected have developed an amazing new way to tell whether someone has a terminal illness or not simply by looking at them (!?) They then refuse to attack or bite that person because, essentially, it would be a waste of their time. Though there's an attempt to explain why this is, it's all rather silly and the concept doesn't work at all.
Because Pitt was the star and producer and wanted this to be his star vehicle, the supporting cast is comprised almost entirely of unknown actors. The few familiar faces (like David Morse) are there and gone in a matter of minutes as SuperBrad - complete with a ridiculous- looking Jesus / messiah haircut - saves the world.