Movie Log: Zombieland

I've mostly avoided the recent string of zombie movies -- much like I skipped the Romero movies before them, and for similar reasons -- but I did catch up with Zombieland recently, because it was compared to Shaun of the Dead.

Well, Zombieland isn't as consistently funny as Shaun is, and it follows the standard big-movie paradigm both more closely and without Shaun's knowing smirk. It's a decent zombie movie, I guess -- though the on-screen body count is awfully low for a real zombie-movie fan, I expect. Woody Harrelson has a lot of fun with his part, while Jesse Eisenberg shows that the motormouth Michael Cera act can be just as annoying in other hands as the original. The two females are there mostly for plot purposes, and to keep the whole thing from being a sausage party -- they're the potential new girlfriend and the replacement kid.

Zombieland is a professionally constructed piece of genre entertainment, forged in the fires of Mount Hollywood's plot mines and honed to a bright sheen identical to half-a-dozen other movies each summer. I enjoyed it, and only felt slightly guilty for doing so. But it freaked out The Wife, making her turn on the highbeams in her car the next night, so she could see the zombies coming from further away and take them out. Caveat emptor.
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Listening to: Titus Andronicus - "Fear & Loathing in Mahwah, NJ"
via FoxyTunes