Zombieland (2009) Review
7/10
A college student who survived by being a shut-in with rules is driving toward Ohio to see whether his parents are alive. He picks up a man going the other way who has no destination and no particular objection to company.
The 7 is for a comedy with a genuinely good structure and a weak third act. The rules device works, the four-hander works, and the film is at its best in a car and in a house and at its worst in the final location it spends thirty minutes reaching.
What it also has is one of the great cameos, which I will not name here, and about eight minutes of a film that nobody else has made. Anybody who has not seen it should be allowed to arrive at that sequence without warning, which is why this review is going nowhere near the specifics of who is in it, what he does, how he has been surviving out there, or the way the whole sequence eventually comes to an end for every single one of the people who are involved in it.
The Rules Are the Device
Columbus survives by having a numbered list, and the film renders each rule on screen as text integrated into the environment as it becomes relevant.
Cardio, double tap, beware of bathrooms, seatbelts. The device is used maybe twenty times and it never becomes tiresome because each appearance is tied to something happening instead of to a joke being told.
The opening credits sequence is where the technique is established. Slow motion, a Metallica track, and a series of people being caught in ordinary places, which tells the audience the film is going to be funny about a catastrophe before a word of dialogue is spoken.
The best use is when a rule saves somebody and the film does not comment. The text appears, the action follows, and the audience has been trained to read the number as a warning about the next ten seconds.
It also does the film’s characterization for free. A person who has a numbered list for staying alive is somebody who was frightened before any of this started, which the film states once and then never explains further.
An on-screen device works when it is tied to action instead of to commentary. Each rule appears because something is about to require it, not because the film wants to be clever. The test is whether removing the device would change the scene. If it only removes a joke, it is decoration.
Let the device characterize. A survival list tells the reader what a person was like before the crisis, which saves you a backstory scene.
Break the pattern deliberately once. The rules stop appearing in the last act, and their absence is the film telling you the character has changed without a line about it.
Harrelson Is the Film
Tallahassee is a man with no plan, no destination and an enormous appetite for killing, and Harrelson plays him as somebody who is genuinely enjoying the apocalypse. That is a harder register than it looks, because a character having this much fun in a collapsed world has to be either a psychopath or grieving.
The film picks grieving, and it withholds the reason for most of the running time. The Twinkie hunt is presented as a joke for an hour and the explanation, when it comes, recontextualizes every scene he has been in.
He tells the story in a car, briefly, without ceremony, and the film moves on immediately. It does not linger, does not score it, and does not give anybody a response.
What makes Harrelson’s performance work is that the discovery does not change his behavior. He goes back to enjoying himself in the next scene, which is what people who are managing something really do.
The Four-Hander
Two con artist sisters join the group by robbing them twice, and the film gets a considerable amount out of four people who have no reason to trust each other.
Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin play the sisters as a partnership that predates the apocalypse, with a working method and a shared history of small crime, and the film is careful to make their distrust reasonable instead of obstructive.
Jesse Eisenberg does the narration and the anxiety, and the romance between Columbus and Wichita is the least interesting thing in the picture, which the film mostly recognizes by not spending much time on it.
Abigail Breslin gets the better half of the sisters. Little Rock is twelve, has never had a normal childhood, and her entire want across the film is to go on a fairground ride once, which is the only motivation in the picture anybody could call innocent.
The house sequence is the film at its peak. Four people in a mansion with no zombies present, playing with celebrity possessions, drinking, and being briefly comfortable, and it is the only stretch where the group functions as people instead of as a unit.
The gift shop sequence does the same job earlier and worse, which is instructive. Two of them destroy a roadside store full of souvenirs and the scene is energetic and means nothing, because nobody has anything at stake in it yet.
Give your group one sequence with no threat in it. The audience needs to see them enjoying each other before the danger can mean anything. Most action comedies skip this because it does not advance anything, and it is the reason the deaths in those films do not land.
Make distrust reasonable instead of obstructive. The sisters rob them because that is a sensible policy in a collapsed world, and the group has to earn its way past that.
Withhold a character’s grief and deliver it in one unscored paragraph. The lack of ceremony is what makes it land, and the return to normal behavior afterward is what makes it true.
The Cameo
About halfway through, the group reaches a house in Los Angeles belonging to somebody famous, who turns out to be alive. The sequence runs about eight minutes and is the best thing in the film.
What makes it work is that the joke is not the presence of a celebrity. It is that this particular person has been surviving by pretending to be a zombie, is bored, is delighted by visitors, and is entirely willing to mock his own career.
It also functions as the film’s one genuine surprise, which is why it has been protected by audiences for fifteen years. Almost nobody who has seen it will tell you in advance.
The scene ends badly, in a way that is both funny and a genuine loss, and the film is disciplined enough to let the group be quiet afterward for about thirty seconds before moving on.
The willingness to appear at all is the reason it works. Somebody at the height of a long career agreeing to be shot in his own home while wearing zombie makeup, and doing it without protecting his dignity, is a rarer thing than the scene lets on.
The Amusement Park
The last act sends two characters to a theme park that has been fully illuminated, which attracts every zombie in the county, and the film spends thirty minutes there.
It is the weakest stretch by a wide margin. The location is a set piece looking for a reason, the peril is manufactured, and the film has to make two intelligent characters do something stupid to get everybody there.
What the finale does supply is spectacle, and the drop tower sequence is well staged, and none of it is as good as four people in a car arguing about who gets to drive.
The last line is also a mistake. Columbus narrates a summary of what he has learned about family, which is the one moment the film explains itself, and everything before it had been content to show.
It was also made for about twenty-three million and took over a hundred, which is why the franchise exists at all. The sequel arrived a decade later with the same four people and considerably less of the structure that made this one work.
If your characters have to become stupid to reach your climax, the climax is in the wrong place. Build the finale out of something they would plausibly do. The diagnostic is whether you needed a contrivance to move them. One is a warning and two is a structural problem.
Scale is not escalation. A bigger location with more threats is not the same as raising the stakes, and audiences can tell the difference immediately.
Never summarize your theme in the last line. If the film has shown four people becoming something like a family, narrating that fact takes the conclusion away from the audience.
Should you watch Zombieland?
Yes, for the first eighty minutes. A road comedy with a rules device that works, a man hunting a snack cake for reasons the film withholds beautifully, eight minutes nobody should spoil, and a theme park finale that belongs to a lesser picture.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 2 of my film lists