Another Big Budget with No Script

Rating: Null/10 (21 June 2013)

World War Z (2013)
** (out of 4)
Brad Pitt plays a U.N. worker who must leave his family behind and go search for a cause or cure for a zombie outbreak that is pretty much destroying every form of life. On his mission he must travel across the globe trying to see what might work in the human's defense of the zombies. I'll admit upfront that I haven't read the book that this film is based on so I can't comment on if it butchered the book or if the film got it right. That aspect of the conversation just doesn't bother me but what does bother me is that we've got an insanely high budget and yet they couldn't work out some sort of interesting story. For the most part we just see Brad Pitt going from one beautiful location to the next and we see that the once beautiful place is now full of zombies. Every once in a while Mr. Pitt has to walk through dark hallways and what really hurts the film is that these sequences just aren't scary. In fact, I'm going to say it right out loud that there wasn't a single scary moment to be found in this picture and the entire "disaster" aspect of what was going on just didn't work for me. Never did I feel that the world was really coming to an end and this is a big-budget that can't pull this off yet look at what someone like Romero did in no money. Another problem is that the zombies are all rather bland whether they're real effects or the majority of them CGI. They're not scary, no creative and the lack of gore shouldn't be bashed because you don't need gore to be scary but at the same time when you have the violence off-screen it just makes the film seem rather childish. Pitt offers a nice performance but this is certainly far from his best. It was nice seeing David Morse and the rest of the supporting players are good as well. I don't know what was wrong with the final third of the movie where they had to go back and film a new one but what we got here just doesn't work as its too slow and boring. WORLD WAR Z, sadly, is delivered as a very disappointing movie no matter if you're familiar with the original source or not.