Everything "World War Z" does well can't make up for a vapid, undeveloped script and fundamental mishandling of the zombie-horror formula...

Rating: 4/10 (29 September 2013)

(Just a note, this review is based on the unrated cut of the film, and I have never read the original novels that inspired this release)
Within 10 minutes of the Brad Pitt starring vehicle "World War Z", I recognized the problem. This is one of those movies that is made by a creative team that fundamentally understands the sort of film they are trying to make, and aims at their target carefully... Before turning 90 degrees away from the target and firing at random due to an awful script and the mishandling of its material. It's a film that does so much well, but tragically fails at what it sets out to do by missing that target.
How does it miss that target? Well, let me explain.
The film stars Brad Pitt as Gerry Lane, a former UN employee. One morning, while driving with his family (I'm not going to list their names of the actresses, because, well... they don't matter in the story), a full-on "zombie" attack breaks out, forcing them to flee and seek shelter.
After meeting with a former colleague, Deputy Secretary-General Thierry Umutoni (Fana Mokoena) aboard a navy vessel, Gerry agrees to accompany a team on an increasingly dangerous series of missions all over the world, searching for the cause of this "zombie" outbreak and a way to try and stop it.
The acting is good. Pitt plays a convincing man who is struggling between his duty to try and remedy the situation, while also not wanting to lose his family. Mokoena plays a good (albeit generic) military figure. Daniella Kertesz is very good as "Segen", an Isrealli soldier whom Gerry saves. And just to be fair, though she's essentially useless in the film, Mireille Enos is decent as Gerry's wife Karin. I will not comment on the two actresses portraying their daughters, because they just weren't very good, and I don't want to say something nasty about a child actor.
And to be honest, much of the production is very good. The direction by Marc Forster is very competent, and he's grown tremendously as an action-director since his mess-of-a-Bond-film "Quantum of Solace." The music by Marco Beltrami was a blast, and had a very cool, simplistic, almost retro sound. And the photography, set and production design was great. (Although the "Zombies" looked bad, I'm sorry.)
However, a film with such decent acting and such a strong visual production is what makes the glaring problems stand out even more.
The script is the first issue, and arguably the biggest issue. One of the fundamental necessities for a film is to have characters we identify with, and either go through development or don't go through development as a result of the events they face in the film. This film makes no effort to establish characters beyond the most rudimentary, painfully clichéd set-ups and robotic dialog. Nor is there any effort made to develop characters. These didn't feel like people, they felt like people-shaped wind-up toys. And the pacing of the script doesn't help. It's so break-neck that you can never actually get a feel for anyone, nor do you get the chance for the gravity of the situation to set in. Which is a shame because there are so many potentially amazing scenes. But unfortunately, within 30 seconds of any scene starting, "zombies" show up and we're onto the next scene after a prolonged chase sequence.
The other huge problem is how the film mishandles the idea of "zombie"- horror. You've probably noticed that I've made an effort to put the word "zombie" in quotes. And that's for a reason- the "zombies" in this film... aren't really "zombies." They're just sort of a crowd of sprinting people who bite you once then keep moving. They're not scary. In fact, up until about the halfway mark on the film, they weren't even portrayed as undead, they were portrayed as sick, rabid people- which made it really rather jarring when you suddenly see a corpse's fingers moving and realize that they technically are supposed to be "undead."
But the film seems to want to portray zombie's as a feverishly paced marathon team that just sort of rams their way through things. And it doesn't work for the horror or suspense, because every encounter with a zombie turns into the same sort-of chase scene over and over. The film gets boring really quick when you realize that every 10 minutes, we're going to see the heroes sprinting away from a huge group of people. With the exception of one scene set in Jerusalem, the film's horror and action scenes just came off as a bore to sit through.
I'm quite sad at how this film turned out. I'm a huge zombie-horror fan, and I thought the trailers for this film made it look like it was going to do something new and exciting. However, the reality is that a poor script and mishandled material are not new and exciting. They're about as old as film itself, and they're still a chore to sit through, even with good performances and pretty visual effects.
"World War Z" gets a 4 out of 10 from me. It's only for hardcore fans of the actors or "zombie" films.