Fantastic, offbeat

Rating: 8/10 (21 September 2009)

Zombieland is a gleefully twisted mockumentary about a world full of you-know-whats, wherein only five living people remain in the entire world. It’s gory and disgusting, but most of all, it’s terrific fun, with just the right mix of violence and off-kilter comedy.
Jesse Eisenberg plays a young man named Columbus (because that’s where he’s heading, across the wasteland that is the middle US). Columbus is scared of just about everything: clowns, the cloths people use to wipe down tables, bathrooms, you name it. A hot apartment neighbor comes down with this hot new disease that all the cool kids don’t want to have, and before you know it he’s killed her (well, rekilled) and is on the run, fleeing zombies and making up a long list of rules of how to survive in the eponymous new land. Near the beginning of our story, he meets up with a man he calls Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), who’s, uh, on his way to Tallahassee, and they in turn meet with a couple of con girls (Abagail Breslin and Emma Stone).
Comparisons to Shaun of the Dead are somewhat apt, as both movies are comedic takes on a horror subgenre, and director Ruben Fleischer was influenced by the Simon Pegg-Nick Frost movie. But. Zombieland is both funnier and more sincere; it’s not a slapstick comedy, and it’s not really a horror film, as Shaun of the Dead was. In fact, it’s sort of quirky and genreless.
There were a LOT of laugh-out-loud moments for me in this movie, and I think a chief reason it all gels is that the leads are so perfectly cast. Eisenberg is awesome as the protagonist, the vulnerable hero, and Harrelson is a real hoot as the Mad-Max-like (or maybe Ash from Evil Dead) gentle psycho who desires nothing more than to waste zombies and find one, just one, Twinkie. Yes, I said Twinkie! I also really liked Abagail Breslin as the moppet Little Rock. It’s always tough for child actors to make the transition into more-adult roles, but she’s up to the task here. Emma Stone is tough and sweet as her sisterly counterpart.
There’s a cameo that’ll surely surprise you – and what’s more, it really works. The actor – no spoilers here! – really sells the role. Let’s just say that he plays himself. Did I mention that the main characters are headed to California and that basically everyone else in the world is either dead or a zombie? Everyone? You don’t often hear people applaud during a movie, but applaud we did at a couple key moments. The final scene in an amusement park is witty and lighthearted, at least as lighthearted as mowing down zombies with machine guns can be.
Now, granted, there’s plenty of blood splattering, plenty of gore, plenty of cursing, and even some nudity. And yes, it’s even gratuitous. But not for a zombie movie. For a zombie movie, those things are sort of underplayed a little bit, at least in the true horror sense – they’re played much more for chuckles than anything else. If anything, Zombieland is a movie that dares you to take it seriously, just so it can pull the rug out from under you and we can all laugh. It’s an offbeat look at an overused genre that cranks out the guts and guffaws in equal, lethal doses.