Nicholas Thurkettle

Zombieland
Director: Ruben Fleischer
Writers: Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick
Producer: Gavin Polone
Stars: Woody Harrelson, Jessie Eisenberg, Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin, Amber Heard

I hope some day Ken Burns makes an epic documentary about zombies. I think by now they are as thoroughly woven into the fabric of America as jazz and baseball. In the four decades since George A. Romero created the American brand of zombie with Night of the Living Dead, it has become more than a movie monster. The word itself conjures so much about us – the zombie is the dull but ravenous consumer we can be at our worst, it provokes us about the ways we attempt to ignore or defy death, and it forces us to face how we cling to petty and superficial distractions when darker forces are marshalling.

It is also, when it wants to be – this pale, slack-jawed shadow self – bloody hilarious.

Zombieland can only be a comedy because zombies mean so much to us already. This marriage of mismatched buddy road movie with tongue-in-cheek ultra-violence is thoroughly zombie-literate, and can thus dispense with the niceties in favor of 81 minutes of raucous, beautiful vulgarities. It has no interest in bogging us down in consideration of these ghouls, it just wants to take us on a music-cranking, donut-turning joyride through the graveyard with them. It riffs over the horror gospel the way the Sex Pistols punked with My Way, and that mixture of rude surface and underlying impassioned respect makes it a joy for the faithful while showing the uninitiated what a cool place it is to be.
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