Zombieland: Double Tap (2019)

REVIEW BY: ROBERT CHANDLER

ZOMBIELAND: DOUBLE TAP delivers what it promises: fun and zombie kills, and a reunion with a great cast, which, when we met them ten years ago in ZOMBIELAND, had become a new family. That's where the survivors found themselves in the original film, with the z-apocalypse affording them the chance to create new identities, taking their new names from their hometowns. Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), Whichita (Emma Stone), Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin). It was a chance to begin again (although Little Rock and Wichita were sisters) and it was supposed to allow the characters not to connect or get to know each other too well. If they so chose.

This dynamic was part of the original's appeal. The other aspect that worked was the film being so knowing in its humour and storytelling. It felt like the final word on a genre that surely had reached the end of its line.

The current cycle of zombie films started with Hammer's 1966 PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES with its lovely colour nightmare cemetery sequence with the dead rising from their graves; it was a premise and sequence that inspired George Romero to expand upon when, in 1969, he made his NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, a film that for a long period of time had the distinction of being the most profitable movie ever made when comparing box office take to original budget. Romero's film was a poignant commentary on race - the lone surviving hero, a black man, emerges from a night of besieged farmhouse terror to be met by an armed posse of white men who do not hesitate to shoot him dead. Romero followed NIGHT a few years later with another masterpiece, DAWN OF THE DEAD, which placed the survivors in a shopping mall and consequently offered up an interesting commentary on capitalism and consumerism framed within an exciting zombie movie about survivalism. I remember the effect of seeing DAWN in the UK cinemas in 1978, it was like listening to the Sex Pistols. One emerged knowing the world had changed.

In 2004, DAWN was both warmly satirised in SHAUN OF THE DEAD and remade with sprinter zombies by Zack Snyder and James Gunn in the same-titled DAWN OF THE DEAD, leading to a feeling the cycle was coming to a close. Hence, a few years later, in 2009, the self-aware ZOMBIELAND. We were done, we had some fun, but the threat had been neutralised.

Or had it? Only a year later and THE WALKING DEAD hit the tv screens, proving there was plenty of life to be had in the undead. TWD was big business and is still running. Other interesting works appeared in which zombiedom was further explored, with one sub-genre in particular proving fruitful, that of telling the point-of-view stories of single zombie characters. Movies such as COLIN, MAGGIE (also Abigail Breslin, playing the zombified daughter of Arnold Schwarzenegger), and CARGO (Martin Freeman, who becomes infected and, knowing he is becoming a zombie, sets things up so he can - while he is a zombie - save his baby daughter).

I guess the question is... do we really need a ZOMBIELAND 2? What more can be said about or with the genre?

It's an unwritten rule of genre film, especially horror, that it is a filmmaker's duty to push the boundaries, to reinvent, to do or show something fresh with the genre. To move it forwards, always.

ZOMBIELAND 2 doesn't do that. What it does do, though, is provide a lively rag-tag tale in which our family-of-four get to do fun things (live in the White House, visit Graceland) while fighting and killing zombies. Complications happen, they fall out and separate, they get together again.

A Shaun of the Dead gag is introduced where they meet a couple of survivors (Luke Wilson and Thomas Middleditch) who exactly mirror the Harrelson and Eisenberg characters, thus amplifying the excesses of each: Harrelson's arrogance is doubled; as is Eisenberg's neuroticism. Rosario Dawson, playing an Elvis fan can only stand beside Emma Stone and watch on as the men magnify the very things that make them ridiculous (but also perhaps allow for their survival). This was the film's most interesting moment and I wanted Dawson and Stone to leave the men to it and set out on their own.

That they would never do this highlights the film's weakness... the women characters are written so as to be defined by the men and what the men want from them. It makes the film feel dated. When Zoey Deutch (see what a great cast it has!) pitches up as an airhead blonde in pink (hello NIGHT OF THE COMET, although in that 1984 cult film, the Valley Girls who survived the apocalypse drove the story and were not defined by men; they also, in turn, led to Joss Whedon's BUFFY), she is often ridiculed and is never given a chance to shine or prove herself to be more than her caricature. Okay, maybe she does once, using a can of mace.

There are some extra treats to be had in the credits at both ends, via a riff on the Columbia Pictures logo at the front; and through a terrific end sequence featuring Bill Murray reprising the role as "himself" from the 2009 film, where we get an origin story of sorts with Bill being interviewed for a press junket for GARFIELD THREE when the z-virus breaks out. (This mini-movie is actually a better Bill Murray zombie film than Jim Jarmusch's recent effort.)

ZOMBIELAND: DOUBLE TAP is a fun enjoyable ride, it is never dull, and it feels good genuinely to be back with our favourite new-formed family wandering the undead wasteland of the USA