For zombies, by zombies, vaguely about zombies

Rating: 1/10 (11 October 2009)

8.4 out of 10. Somebody must have given zombies the vote.
* SPOILER ALERT * Except, what's to spoil? The writers ran out of ideas roughly seven minutes into the film. It starts off OK, if not brilliantly. Via excessive voice-over, we are introduced to our first one-dimensional Hollywood cardboard cut-out character ("25-year old, nerdy, Jewish, obsessive-compulsive, A-student, virgin"). He has a set of rules for survival: a nice device, but none of the rules are exactly hilarious.
We then meet our second one-dimensional character ("roughneck with barely concealed warm heart"), and our first none-dimensional character ("feisty girl with no logical motivation for anything she does other than to present a series of romantic challenges for her one- dimensional male admirer").
** SPOILER ** Hence, the two cardboard men enter a shop looking to help reinforce the film's product placement deal. They kill three zombies in inexplicably unnecessary ways, then enter a back room to find two girls (how have they evaded the zombies?), waiting for real people (how did they know the only other two people in America would be passing by?), so they can trick them (why?) and steal their car (why, when there are millions of cars?) and guns (ditto) and drive off in the opposite direction.
Then, they lay another trap for the guys (how did they know they'd change direction from east to west and pass by in that direction, down that country road, at that time?), steal their car again (why, when they have one already?), kidnap them instead of leaving them behind (why? why? why? why? and, then again, why?). Ad absurdum, ad infinitum.
The middle hour of the film made no attempt to interrupt the enveloping boredom. With Bill Murray, this is the first time I've seen an actor introduced into a film exactly as if he were a piece of product placement, along with ample cringeworthy toadying. It felt as if the studio had said, "the script's not long enough, and we need an extra 25 pages. Bill Murray owes us a favour, so you can have him for an afternoon, if you like. But you only have an hour to write it." They remark on how much he looks like Eddie Van Halen, which is bizarre, because he clearly looks like Michael Jackson. But maybe they thought referencing Jackson would have felt too much like introducing a joke into the film.
The final act was merely a bland shoot-'em-up computer game, but without the intellectual dimension.
The role the zombies play in this film is as an uninteresting, unthreatening MacGuffin required to cause occasional distractions from what is in essence the lamest love story between two of the least interesting characters in modern film.
It's an insult to America to refer to Zombieland as an American Shaun of the Dead, a film which incidentally has an IMDb rating of just 7.8, against Zombieland's 8.4. Which is rather like Star Wars rating 7.8 against Plan 9 from Outer Space rating 8.4.
1 out of 10 because 0 isn't an option.