Flat, unexciting latest addition to the zombie staple

Rating: 4/10 (11 December 2013)

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning
Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) is a retired UN worker who has taken his family out on an ordinary, everyday trip, only, for, well, zombies to suddenly start running around out of nowhere and killing everybody. Being the hero of a Hollywood movie, naturally he gets himself and his family to safety, and gets in touch with his old muckers at the UN to find out what's going on, and they end up taking him away from his family to lead a trek over to Israel to discover the source of the mayhem, and look for a cure to stop it before it's too late.
Shot in a new, almost experimental digitally altered lens, World War Z is the latest film to re-hash the 'zombie' genre, already explored by the likes of I Am Legend and Dawn of the Dead, not to mention Brit entries like 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later. So originality isn't the name of the game here (when is it in Hollywood these days?) and with the bar set so low, you'd expect this knock off of other films before it to at least try and take the genre in a different direction. But World War Z simply explodes in to the action within the first few minutes, without any sort of attempt at character development, meaning we could simply care less about the fate of these characters, which makes the ensuing ride all the more tedious.
Impressive zombie effects can't hide a banal, boring script that's lost your attention within the first few minutes. As such, lead star Pitt blandly goes through the motions, at the hands of slovenly direction from Marc Forster. Sometimes these types of films can try and have some kind of hidden social message to them or deeper significance, but it's hard to pick up anything here. Despite being the type of film it would probably have been better to have seen there, this failed to draw me to the cinema to see it, and I left it to DVD, where it's minimal impact is felt even less.
Not so much World War Z, more World War Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Certainly Z grade. **