Movie Review: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Pride & Prejudice & Zombies

Directed by: Burr Steers.

Written by: Burr Steers based on the books by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith.

Starring: Lily James (Elizabeth Bennet), Sam Riley (Colonel Fitzwilliam Darcy), Bella Heathcote (Jane Bennet), Ellie Bamber (Lydia Bennet), Millie Brady (Mary Bennet), Suki Waterhouse (Kitty Bennet), Douglas Booth (Mr. Bingley), Sally Phillips (Mrs. Bennet), Charles Dance (Mr. Bennet), Jack Huston (Lt. George Wickham), Lena Headey (Lady Catherine de Bourgh), Matt Smith (Parson Collins), Emma Greenwell (Caroline Bingley).

I think it’s fair to say that Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice – probably her most loved novel – doesn’t need zombies for the story to work. The novel, and several filmed versions of it, work just about perfectly – the characters are witty and clever, there’s drama and heartbreak and comedy and romance, and anything else a reasonable reader/viewer could want. Yet, I also have to admit that having seen several different versions of Pride and Prejudice on screen – including several “updates” (like Bridget Jones or Bride & Prejudice), zombies are pretty much the only thing that hasn’t been added to previous screen versions before, so what the hell, why not? There’s not much point in a straight adaptation any more – completists love the BBC Miniseries with Colin Firth, and those who want something more compact could not want a better version than Joe Wright’s 2005 version with Keira Knightley’s best performance to date. Telling the same damn story again, with no zombies, would serve little purpose. So even if Pride and Prejudice and Zombies sounds like something a room full of advertisers would come up with – you know, give the women all that romance crap, and all the men zombie action, and everyone will want to see it – I was at least hoping that the movie would be a fun distraction. And that, it almost is.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Pride & Prejudice & Zombies is how much writer/director Burr Steers really does try his best to get Austen’s original novel on the screen – just with some zombies. I can easily imagine the talented Lily James as Austen’s heroine Elizabeth Bennet in a more traditional telling of the novel – she is feisty and funny and headstrong, and plays the role pretty much straight – which works here. Sam Riley’s Darcy is a stick in the mud for the most part – but then Darcy normally is, until the end, and even if Riley is never quite able to elevate his game – to make his Darcy more than a dullard, he gets most of the performance just right. Bella Heathcote is quietly quite good as Jane Bennet – pining after Bingley, but this time not quite needing him. Best of all may be Matt Smith as Parson Collins – an idiot to be sure, but such a lively one, that even as he says some horribly offensive things, he does such with such vigor, you like him anyway. The costumes are fine, the period details works, etc. Yes, as I said before, another version of Pride & Prejudice is probably not needed – and even if the scenes where they play it straight do not rise to the level of the best versions of the story, they work well enough that the film is a pleasant way to pass the time.

The real problem is that the zombie stuff never quite fits in with the rest of the movie. I understand that the humor of the movie is to introduce the living dead into the prim and proper world of England society – where everyone is so polite that a woman like Elizabeth speaking her mind is considered gossip worthy, so how the world reacts to something like zombies should be good for some laughs. I also get how the Bennet sisters were proto-feminists, so having them be zombie ass-kickers actually makes quite a bit of sense for them. And yet, the presence of zombies is basically a one joke concept – one that is never really explained either – and after the initial shock of seeing the sisters kick ass, there isn’t much room for the movie to go in this direction. It doesn’t much help that the action sequences are not really well staged.

As a writer/director, Steers never quite gets the tone of the movie right – he may well have been able to make a version of Pride & Prejudice – and perhaps, he could have made a decent zombie movie – but he doesn’t blend the two together very well. It’s always one or the other – and when he tries to do both at once, the movie is at its weakest.

Pride & Prejudice & Zombies never really works as well as it should. It has a goofy premise, and really, should have whole heartedly embraced the goofiness that’s inherent in it. That’s not to say the movie is horrible – anything that has this much of Austen’s original, and a very good cast in it, cannot be entirely bad. But it’s not good enough either. Perhaps it’s time to just stop adapting Pride & Prejudice at all. There are although Austen novels after all.

Movie Review: Charlie St. Cloud

Charlie St. Cloud **
Directed By: Burr Steers.
Written By: Craig Pearce & Lewis Colick based on the novel by Ben Sherwood.

Starring: Zac Efron (Charlie St. Cloud), Charlie Tahan (Sam St. Cloud), Amanda Crew (Tess Carroll), Augustus Prew (Alistair Wooley), Donal Logue (Tink Weatherbee), Kim Basinger (Claire St. Cloud), Ray Liotta (Florio Ferrente), Dave Franco (Sully), Matt Ward (Connors).

Zac Efron has a natural likability when he’s onscreen that cannot be taught – you either have it or you don’t. And unlike so much of young Hollywood, he seems to have his head on his shoulders, and is willing to do different types of roles. He easily could have spent the next few years doing bad teen romantic comedies and musicals, but he seems to really want to build his resume with different types of roles, by quality directors – see his work in Me and Orson Welles for Richard Linklater as an example. The fact that his new movie, Charlie St. Cloud, doesn’t really work really isn’t Efron’s fault – in fact he deserves credit for making what should have been a nearly unwatchably cheesy movie bearable. Efron is headed for more major movie stardom I think, but Charlie St. Cloud won’t do him many favors.

Efron plays the title character in this movie about a high school kid who seems to have everything going for him. He is getting good grades, and is so good at sailing that he has gotten a scholarship to Stanford (I didn’t even know they gave out sailing scholarships). It is the summer between high school and university, and he is just killing time before his life starts. And that’s when everything goes wrong. He wants to go to a party, but needs to drop his little brother, Sam (Charlie Tahan) at his friend’s place first, and on the way they get into an accident. Charlie is miraculously saved, but Sam isn’t. Charlie defers his scholarship, and we come back to him five years later. He never left his small town, and now works at the local cemetery. His only commitment is to meet Sam every night at sunset to practice Sam’s pitching. Yes Sam is dead, but Charlie made him a promise before he died, and he intends to keep it. Every night he talks to Sam as life passes him by.

This is when Charlie meets Tess (Amanda Crew) – or I should say re-meets her. They went to high school together, but didn’t really know each other. Now she is preparing to do an around the world, solo sailing race and is back in town to test out her boat. They two laugh and flirt and get a little more serious. But, of course, there is always Sam which could get in Charlie’s way.

There have been a lot of these somewhat tragic romance movies this year aimed at teenagers. There was Dear John with Channing Tatum as a soldier who falls for Amanda Seyfried, The Last Song with an unhappy Miley Cyrus falling for a rich kid and Remember Me, with Robert Pattinson falling for Emile de Ravin. None of them were very good – and neither is Charlie St. Cloud. At least it’s much better than Remember Me, with its sucker punch ending that it did not earn, and its horrible Robert Pattinson performance. In fact, Efron’s charm may make this one the best of the lot – although with this sort of competition, that’s not something to be very proud of.

To me, the movie never really takes off because the story is just so cheesy that you can never really take it seriously. The movie tries so hard to get you to like it, that I had a natural resistance to it – it never really won me over, in part, because I don’t think the movie ever really plays fair – and tries too hard to pull the wool over your eyes. Efron keeps it going, and it should be said that both Charlie Tahan and Amanda Crew, two actors I don’t recall ever seeing before, are likable enough in their roles that they don’t grate on your nerves. However, I couldn’t help but wonder what the point of casting talented actors like Kim Basinger, Ray Liotta and Donal Logue was, considering that the movie never really lets them do anything (and Liotta was a distraction, because he has the same impossibly blue eyes as Efron, making me wonder if it was going to turn out that he was Efron’s long lost father).

The movie was directed by Burr Steers, whose career started off well enough with the very funny, indie teen film Igby Goes Down. Steers apparently wanted money, so he has followed that up with last year’s 17 Again (also starring Efron) and now this. You can’t blame him too much, but it is always a little disappointing when a promising filmmaker goes that route – because it sometimes impossible to get them back (remember Boaz Yakin?),

Charlie St. Cloud is not an awful movie by any means, but watching it, I wondered what the point of it all was. The film never really finds it footing.

DVD Views: 17 Again

17 Again ** ½
Directed By: Burr Steers.
Written By: Jason Filardi.
Starring: Zac Efron (Mike O'Donnell), Leslie Mann (Scarlett O'Donnell), Thomas Lennon (Ned Gold), Matthew Perry (Mike O'Donnell – Adult), Sterling Knight (Alex O'Donnell), Michelle Trachtenberg (Maggie O'Donnell), Hunter Parrish (Stan), Melora Hardin (Principal Jane Masterson).

Zac Efron is attractive in a completely non-threatening way. It is easy to see why his legion of tween girl fans worship him, and why the parents do not seem to mind that obsession all that much. Efron seems like the type of kid that you want your daughter to bring home.

In his new film, 17 Again, Efron plays a 37 year old man who through some magic, that you just have to accept unless you want to ruin the whole movie for yourself, becomes 17 Again. When he was 17 the first time, he gave up his dream of going to University on a basketball scholarship when his girlfriend Scarlett (played by Leslie Mann as the adult version) informs him that she is pregnant. Now, all these years later, O’Donnell (played by Matthew Perry as an adult) is miserable in his life and job. It is not that he does not love his wife, or two kids Maggie (Michelle Trachtenberg) and Alex (Sterling Knight). He just wonders what his life would have been like had he made different decisions. When he wakes up to discover that his a 17 year old again, he sees it as his opportunity - both to win back the love of his family, but perhaps also to get the life he always thought he wanted.

Efron, it must be said, does a very good in his role. No, he looks like Matthew Perry, but he is strangely convincing as a middle aged man trapped in the body of a teenager. While I cannot help but wonder what a movie like this would look like if instead of trying to reconnect with his and wife, Michael had decided to simply screw his way through high school - the girls really do seem to be in love with them. I am sort of surprised that a director from Japan or Korea has not gone all Oldboy on the premise like this and had the guy get younger and ends up sleeping with his daughter. Someone call Paul Verhoeven, he would do it brilliantly and have him get to work on that on.

But that would obviously be a very different movie, and it really isn’t fair to criticize this movie for not being quite as perverted as I am (although, I do think it says something about how uninteresting the movie is that I spent time thinking about this). For what this movie is, it actually is nowhere near as bad as I thought it would be. Efron is fun in his role. Leslie Mann is funny and vulnerable as a woman who is getting divorced even if she does not really want to - she just cannot spend her life with someone so miserable. Thomas Lennon is very good as Mike’s geek of a best friend - who made a fortune in computers and knows how to speak elvish who falls for the high school principal (played by the wonderful Melora Hardin, who is wonderful as Jan on The Office). Sterling Knight is fine as Mike and Scarlett’s geeky son who is hiding his basketball ability and I think Michelle Trachtenberg did a fine job as well, even if every time she was on screen I kept wondering why this woman who playing a teenager nearly a decade ago on Buffy was still playing teenagers.

The film is exactly what you would suspect it would be, and to be honest is actually quite entertaining in fits and starts. The film has a number of great wonderful one liners, which are delivered with flair and style by the cast. Overall though, the movie does not add up to very much. I enjoyed a lot of it, but all too often the movie reverts to clichés. The movie functions on autopilot for much of its running time. Director Burr Steers is just the latest in the long line of talented indie directors who have sold out and made something beneath them (Steers breakthrough film was the wonderful Igby Goes Down). But 17 Again is not as bad as you would think it would be. It’s a fine little movie for tween girls - but anyone above that age group is probably going to be a little disappointed.