unimpressive

Rating: 3/10 (1 July 2013)

We all know about this film's troubled production history and movies with that kind of problematic shooting process always seem to turn out to be either stunning enough to silence the critics or as awful as everyone expected.
sadly WWZ falls into the latter category. Its a mess. Marc Forster shouldn't be allowed to direct action movies. He can't construct those sequences at all well. The superfast cuts and hand held camera make it difficult to see what is going on. The script is a mess, and the fact that the last third of the flick was rewritten and reshot doesn't help.
Brad Pitt is certainly not my idea of a learned man or an intellectual. He looks like a big issue seller.
His family add nothing to the plot as Brad travels the world looking for clues to the zombie outbreak.
The set up of the outbreak and the zombies themselves vary greatly from the ( far superior) book. The idea that the virus takes eleven seconds to turn you into as full blown zombie yet apparently the disease spread so fast because of air travel. With an incubation period that short they must be letting zombies go on holiday nowadays. So the script fails from the outset.
Anyway Brad is sent on a high priority mission to find what caused the infestation. he is not the first choice and is subservient to a virologist. It is a sign of the laziness of the writing that the audience knows the other guy will die allowing Pitt to be the hero long before it happens. The lazy writers make no attempt to handle this subtly and the obstacle to Pitt's heroism simply falls over and shoots himself in the head. Brad Pitt doesn't understand the concept of focus unless the focus is on him.
Several other unlikely and completely bloodless action sequences occur including Bradley cutting off an Israeli soldiers arm with one blow to stop the infection turning her into a zombie. No blood is seen during this and Pitt must be faster than the Man of Steel if the virus turns you into a zombie in eleven seconds. ( Incidentally the Israeli woman is super tough because as well as being bitten by a zombie and having her arm chopped off to save her she survives the blowing up of and crash landing of an aircraft). Brad throws a grenade on the plane kill a zombie- unless he really really doesn't want to go to Wales.
For the so-called climax does indeed take place in Cardiff. After the original ending scenes of an epic battle in Russia were junked, the reshoot was set somewhere cheaper
The resolution of the movie would be the stupidest thing in cinemas this year if not for A Good day To Die hard.
I'm sure some will say that you shouldn't analyse things too much but suspension of belief only goes so far. I don't see why IO should make excuses for a shameless cash grab like this.