Zombieland more than brain-eating

Zombieland

Directed by Ruben Fleischer
Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone, and Abigail Breslin
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Despite the ooze and blood-covered, flesh-crazed hordes, Zombieland is a place that you’ll find yourself wanting to go back to again and again. Ruben Fleischer has crafted a piece of blood-soaked cinema perfection that loses next to nothing on repeated viewings. It’s a strange film that almost effortlessly combines comedy, action, and audience-groan-inducing amounts of gore.

Zombieland has four principal main characters: Columbus, Tallahassee, Wichita, and Little Rock, (Jessie Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone, and Abigail Breslin, respectively), and the rest of the cast is unaccredited and generally wants to consume the aforementioned stars in some truly glorious carnage. The four amigos are named after their eventual destinations to further dehumanize contact between them, in the likely event that social ties could end up endangering personal well-being. This land of chaos, death, and zombies is seen through the eyes of Columbus, Ohio, the 2-million strong capital of the Buckeye state.

Columbus starts the movie outlining the rules, phobias, and complete lack of a social life have kept him alive and give him more depth than traditional zombie movie protagonists. Through his strict rules of the world and the movie’s accompanying narration, the audience gets a front-row seat to view not only the brutality of Zombieland, but the characters that inhabit it.

Harrelson is belly-laugh inducing as the sharp, implement-loving zombie killer Tallahassee, creating chaos everywhere he moves and providing a strange father figure to the rest of the troop. Stone and Breslin wreak havoc on their compatriots as the mindless hordes of Zombieland, but as Columbus points out, girls mature much faster than boys anyways. Tallahassee, Wichita, and Little Rock, along with Columbus, provide an emotional core to the movie while reminding us of the harsh reality that eschews names so as to not doom themselves with emotional attachments.

The flaw in the majority of zombie movies is that too much of the attention, time, and money is spent on making the audience believe the zombies are more than just people in makeup. Zombieland and its stylistic compatriot, Shaun of the Dead, smack such thinking solidly on the forehead, scold it for its misguided attempts at entertainment, and swing the cameras away from the apocalypse and towards the personalities and people. There are no evil scientists, slow decline of society, or other such nonsense; only a passing line about “patient zero” and a burger from a gas and gulp (fast food kills, folks) provide any real grounding to the film.

Fleischer, buoyed on by performances bordering on sublime from Eisenberg and Harrelson, keeps the movie light and airy throughout, liberally sprinkling the script with a fair amount of introspective moments to balance out the hilarity. The tone never shifts once in the experience, and watching Tallahassee and Columbus move through the world, killing zombies as they go has a casual familiarity to it.

The relationship between the two male leads has an almost buddy-cop feel to it, two compatriots facing down a world gone wrong. It’s a plot that could’ve been ripped from the Lethal Weapon lineage with Harrelson’s playing the Riggs to Eisenberg’s Murtaugh.

Zombieland works not because of the zombies, or because it’s hilarious to watch Tallahassee dispatch gobs of the undead, or even for the humor; it’s easily one of the best films of the year because it does nothing more than tell the story of four unique characters’ collective journey through a world ravaged by the undead, and lets the gore, thrills, and laughs flow naturally outwards from that.