Woody of the Dead

Rating: 7/10 (11 October 2009)

For a guy who's portrayed a mass-murdering psychopath (in "Natural Born Killers") and went head-to-head with mass murderer Anton Chigurh (in "No Country for Old Men"), it's anyone's guess as to why Woody Harrelson--he of the perpetual cowboy hat and hickly typecasting--was never enlisted to play the role of undead-whompin' good-'ol boy before. Rest easy, friends: in "Zombieland," that dream is fulfilled, and all is now right with the world. Woody plays Tallahasse, a grizzled zombie hunter plowing across the highways of America to make it to his namesake (and also find a Twinkie along the way, if possible); in his travels, he meets neurotic dweeb Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg, who is really cornering the market on this character type), whose obsessive tendencies and notepad of "rules" has kept him alive; also on board are Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin--"Little Miss Sunshine"), two sisters with their own tough-love survival instincts, who even add a little romantic tension to the mix. True to its title, "Zombieland" knows the character types and conventions of the genre, and expects the audience to, as well: this is a film that plunges us into a world gone to walking-dead hell, and--in the vein of the "Scream" films--knows the clichés that accompany such a scenario, to the point where the surviving inhabitants are pretty jaded toward it all. Director Ruben Fleischer creates a convincingly apocalyptic landscape, and even mines some passages of suspense and rip-roaring action to accompany the laughs, courtesy of Rhett Reese's and Paul Wernick's script. While "Shaun of the Dead" might have beaten "Zombieland" to the punch as far as undead satires/homages are concerned, it's hard to top the thrill of seeing Woody Harrelson pluck strings on a banjo (pretty badly, I might add) to the theme of "Deliverance" to draw overweight zombies out of a supermarket aisle.