Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
The year 2009 feels like a century ago. It was a simpler time. Smartphones were in their infancy phase, Internet memes were just reaching their angsty teenage phase and CGI effects were just starting to mature into tolerable mature entities.
The vampire-werewolf days were at a close and zombies, while making their first renaissance since the 80s, were not overdone.
This is when the first Zombieland hit the screens and it was phenomenal. A homage and parody, it celebrated the different ages of zombies on screen while poking fun at the numerous obvious deaths in these movies. It was a road trip, college coming-of-age and zombie apocalypse, but it still managed to have non-ironic emotional appeal and a very healthy dose of Ol’ Bill Murray.
To this day, the movie holds a 90 per cent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Culturally, it was the first time we saw the directorial prowess of Ruben Fleitscher in a feature length movie and he brought his experience directing commercials and music videos to the big screen.
It had meme and GIF-worthy moments before they were popular. It was campy and self-aware before the Internet made “meta” the highbrow hipster’s huzzah. But perhaps most significantly, it showed the world that the zombie genre wasn’t dead. Walking Dead premiered a year later to much fanfare and four decent seasons.
There were talks of a sequel even before it hit the big screen. Ruben got along well with all of the cast, going on to direct Jesse Eisenberg in 30 Minutes or Less, Emma Stone in Gangster Squad and Woody Harrelson in Venom.
Development hell is a word thrown around for such projects, which become victims of their actors’ success. Meanwhile the zombie genre became quickly oversaturated again, with Walking Dead, iZombie, Santa Clarita Diet and the 132 other zombie-related movies and TV shows that have come since then.
So I was excited to see the return of Zombieland. I hoped for a new angle, more fun and perhaps a refresher on why the four of them just worked so well together. And as the cadence of that sentence may suggest, I was disappointed.
To start off, I am now convinced that Jesse Eisenberg is the modern day Peter Pan. His character, Columbus, doesn’t seem to have aged a day. He still can’t seem to grow a beard, is just as awkward and uh, super, uh, nerdy, with, uh, a relentless nervous tick, even though his character has apparently spent the better part of the last decade surviving zombies. Seriously, every character the actor has done is a variant of awkward millennial college freshman, including Lex Luthor in Batman vs Superman.
Woody Harrelson is just as legendary as the first time, even if he is self-aware about how repetitive his routine becomes. His character, Tallahassee was and remains the ultimate celebration and condemnation of Americana.
Emma Stone, in her role as Wichita, also seems to have frozen in time.
Abigail Breslin’s character Little Rock is the only one who seems to have grown, even if it was because she had literally and biologically grown from teenager into adult.
There was so much they could have done with the 10-year gap the two movies had. Imagine how many stories and inside jokes a group of four can build over a decade. But instead, the movie went for weak references to Uber and Pinkberry with the new metaphorically and literally living-in-a-2009-freezer character of Madison (played by Zoey Deutch).
Don’t get me wrong. It’s a good time, but it hardly feels like the decade long-gap was worth it or even reflected in the movie. The jokes are good but simple reworkings of the original. Instead of one nerd-redneck pairing, this time, there are two. It’d probably be a good Halloween double-feature, with the original, but as a lasting sequel or the kick-off to a new film universe, it’s not. If you do watch it, stay for the mid-credit and post-credit scene with Bill Murray. It justifies the ticket price.
And for run-of-the-mill repeat jokes and a façade of emotional undertones, I give this movie a 2.5.
