Movie Review: Zombieland: Double Tap

Zombieland: Double Tap ** ½ / *****

Directed by: Ruben Fleischer.

Written by: Dave Callaham and Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick.

Starring: Woody Harrelson (Tallahassee), Jesse Eisenberg (Columbus), Emma Stone (Wichita), Abigail Breslin (Little Rock), Rosario Dawson (Nevada), Zoey Deutch (Madison), Luke Wilson (Albuquerque), Avan Jogia (Berkeley), Thomas Middleditch (Flagstaff). 

 

It’s more than a little odd to be getting a sequel to Zombieland 10 years after the original came out. The original was a surprise hit in 2009 – the year before The Walking Dead TV show came on the air, and started another wave of zombie entertainment, that has petered out a little as the massive success of that show has faded in recent years. It almost feels like on both ends, Zombieland just missed the zombie boom.

 

The original film was a lot of fun – it isn’t quite Shaun of the Dead as far as zombie comedies go – but it’s about as good as you could get otherwise. It was fun and clever and bloody, and had a great foursome of actors at its core, and a legendary cameo, and was basically just a fun time at the movies. It wasn’t exactly brilliant or groundbreaking in any way – but hell if I didn’t have fun watching it back in 2009. With Double Tap, the film picks up 10 years later, and yet honestly, it kind of feels like the same thing all over again. There’s no real sense that time has passed here – and hell, if Abigail Breslin who was only 13 when the first came out, wasn’t part of the core four, you wonder if they would have tried to pass it off as something closer to the original in terms of its date.

 

The film is fine, I guess. I’ve certainly had a worst time at the movies than spending 90 minutes with this talented cast cracking jokes and killing zombies. If the original didn’t really do anything new, then the sequel does even less than that. It adds some new characters – but really only Zoey Deutch’s Madison leaves an impact. She’s bobble headed bimbo who has spent years living at the mall in the Pinkberry freezer, who joins up with Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) and Columbus (Jessie Eisenberg) a month after Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Breslin) run out on the pair of them – Wichita because she isn’t sure she wants to stay in a relationship with Columbus, and Little Rock because she’s tired of Tallahassee treating her like a kid. Little Rock then runs off with Berkeley – a pot smoking, guitar playing hippie – leaving Wichita in the dust, who then returns to her old partners to try and track down Little Rock, and have lots of awkward conversations with Columbus and Madison.

 

Deutch is a delight I must say – so much of a delight in fact that you almost forget how what a sexist caricature she is playing here. Some have complained that the film is misogynistic – and while I can see that (and not just because of Madison) – I also think that’s giving the film too much credit. It was odd watching the film the day after I heard Harrelson on WTF with Marc Maron, saying he kept rejecting scripts over the years for a Zombieland sequel until they found the right one – because this strikes me as a particularly lazy script, and for the most part it seems the cast is going through the motions as well. The whole thing feels warmed over – and while it’s impossible to truly hate a film with Harrelson, Eisenberg and Stone sniping at each other – even half-heartedly, and there are moments that quite good (I quite like Thomas Middleditch’s cameo – although casting Luke Wilson as his scene partner seems like a missed opportunity to get McConaughey back for a True Detective reunion).

 

In total, Zombieland: Double Tap kind of feels like the sequel to Zombieland we should have gotten in 2011 – and forgotten all about by now. If you’re going to bring everyone back 10 years later to do a sequel to a movie that does have a following – but is mostly just half remembered – you should probably have more of a reason to exist that Zombieland Double Tap does. You likely won’t hate the film – but it won’t have you waiting anxiously for 2029’s Zombieland: Triple Tap.

Movie Review: Venom

Venom ** ½ / *****

Directed by: Ruben Fleischer.

Written by: Scott Rosenberg & Jeff Pinkner and Kelly Marcel and Will Beall based on the Marvel comics by Todd McFarlane & David Michelinie.

Starring: Tom Hardy (Eddie Brock / Venom), Michelle Williams (Anne Weying), Riz Ahmed (Dr. Carlton Drake/Riot), Scott Haze (Roland Treece), Reid Scott (Dr. Dan Lewis), Jenny Slate (Dr. Dora Skirth), Melora Walters (Homeless Woman Maria), Peggy Lu (Mrs. Chen), Ron Cephas Jones (Jack).

 

Venom is not a good movie. Watching it, it is easy to see the many, many flaws it has running throughout, flaws that should have been easy to fix. The first hour of the film is dull – and full of boring exposition, and some pretty terrible performances by very talented actors like Michelle Williams and Riz Ahmed – who are so bad here you’re tempted to just write it off as the screenplay and direction being so awful they didn’t have a chance. The second hour at least has more life to it, but the action sequences are not very good, even by the low standards of having one giant CGI monster fight another giant CGI monster. But the movie has a saving grace – something that doesn’t make it worth seeing per se, but does make me curious about it if they do in fact make a sequel. And that is Tom Hardy, who stars as Eddie Brock/Venom – and unlike most superhero movies, this time it really is a dual role. Hardy throws himself into this dual role, and once Venom comes out to play, he delivers a glorious crazy performance here – something I didn’t expect from Hardy, because it’s almost more in the vein of something you’d see from Nicolas Cage. If the whole movie were Hardy arguing with himself, I would have loved it.

 

But before we get there, we have to spend an hour of boring exposition that the team of four screenwriters, and director Ruben Fleischer seems to think we need for some reason. Basically, egomaniacal, crazed billionaire Carlton Drake (Ahmed) has been funding rocket missions into space – and this time, he has brought back some “samples” from deep space. These samples are basically black goo, that can merge with host bodies – that is, unless like an organ transplant, this goo rejects the host, killing them. The flight with these samples crashes in Malaysia – and one of the samples escapes. The rest come back to San Francisco, where Drake is located – as is enterprising reporter Eddie Brock. Brock is assigned a puff piece – interview Drake about his rockets – but, of course, he has too much integrity for that. So what he does instead is break into his girlfriend’s – Anne (Michelle Williams) email, because she is a lawyer at the firm that represents Drake, and steal confidential information about wrongful death lawsuits. This, of course, ends with both Brock and Anne fired, and the end of their relationship. There is more – a lot more – about experiments on homeless people, people inside Drake’s company who get pangs of conscience and several other subplots that go nowhere. All of this is to setup what we know walking into the movie – that the black goo is going to merge with Brock, turning him into Venom – an anti-hero, who is big, mean and violent – prone to biting people’s heads off when he turns into a giant black beast.

 

Venom repeats the problem a lot of superhero origin stories make – that the filmmakers think the audience cares about the insane ways these people get their powers. We do not. And we certainly do not need an hour of boring exposition before we finally get we showed up to see. It doesn’t help much that until Venom shows up, Hardy’s Brock is just an asshole – and only a somewhat charming asshole – and that no one else leaves an impression at all. Williams is such a good actress – she really is one of our very best, and she has turned nothing roles into something before, most recently whatever she was doing in I Feel Pretty, which was hilarious. But she’s undone in a role like this, which really requires her to do nothing except look at Brock doe-eyed and in love at first, and then with disappointment later on. Love interests in these movies often don’t last long – it’s why we haven’t seen Natalie Portman in Thor for a while, but Williams in particular gets the short shrift. Ahmed, an immensely talented actor, doesn’t have much to do as the villain either – trying, I think, to be an understated version of Elon Musk – but what the hell is the point of that?

 

As the movie moved along, I enjoyed it more and more though. It is a lot of fun to see Hardy argue with the voice inside his own – a wickedly profane voice at that – and it’s nice that Brock doesn’t seem to have many moral qualms about using his powers to, you know, eat people – as long as they are bad. Hardy is great in those latter scenes, as he gets increasingly unhinged. The action sequences don’t help him much – Fleischer doesn’t seem to know what to do with them, and essentially we end up looking at little more than CGI soup. There is a post-credits scene (of course there is) which sets up a sequel, and it isn’t very good, but perhaps the actual sequel could be.

 

The key for that to happen would be to bring a director better adept at directing action, and letting Hardy loose for the entire runtime. Venom is a movie that buried the lede – the thing that makes you want to see the movie in the first place. Had they replaced it with something entertaining or interesting, great. But here, they make you wade through an hour of boring dreck to get there.

Movie Review: Gangster Squad

Gangster Squad
Directed by: Ruben Fleischer.
Written by: Will Beall based on the book by Paul Lieberman.
Starring: Josh Brolin (Sgt. John O'Mara), Ryan Gosling (Sgt. Jerry Wooters), Emma Stone (Grace Faraday), Sean Penn (Mickey Cohen), Nick Nolte (Chief Parker), Anthony Mackie (Officer Coleman Harris), Robert Patrick (Officer Max Kennard), Michael Peña (Officer Navidad Ramirez), Giovanni Ribisi (Officer Conway Keeler), Sullivan Stapleton (Jack Whalen), Mireille Enos (Connie O'Mara), Troy Garity (Wrevock), James Carpinello (Johnny Stomp), John Aylward (Judge Carter), Jon Polito (Dragna).

Sometimes when I get bored watching a movie, I start to wonder about the actors in the film. Did they know they were making a bad movie? Are they doing things to amuse themselves? I bring this up because as I watched Gangster Squad, I couldn’t help but think that perhaps Ryan Gosling knew what a bad movie this was going to turn out to be, and the ridiculous clipped, nasal voice  he uses throughout the film was his way of keeping things interesting for himself. I’m probably completely wrong about that – but no matter what the reason is behind Gosling’s strange vocal tics in the movie, I’m glad he employed them. Because there really is very little in Gangster Squad that held my interest in the least.

The film takes place in 1949 Los Angeles. This is the world that James Ellroy has so vividly captured throughout his career as a novelist – especially in his masterpiece L.A. Confidential (turned into a great movie by Curtis Hanson in 1997). Ellroy’s book crackle with violence and sex, and have perfect, hard boiled dialogue in them. The screenplay for Gangster Squad by Will Beall tries very hard to ape this dialogue, but pretty much gets it all wrong. No one in the movie says anything remotely interesting.

Anyway, it’s L.A. in 1949. Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn) a boxer turned mobster has come to L.A. and pretty much runs the town’s criminal enterprise. He even has the gangsters back home in Chicago scared of him. He does what he wants because he has money enough to buy everyone he needs to stay out of his way, and is ruthless enough to kill those who don’t. John O’Mara (Josh Brolin) is a veteran back from WWII, who fought for “freedom” over there, and hates what he sees becoming of his beloved town. He is seemingly the only honest cop in town. After he roughes up some of Cohen’s men, he is called into the office of the Chief of Police (Nick Nolte) and told to assemble a squad. The Chief wants O’Mara to go to war with Cohen – not to kill him – but drive him out of town with his tail between his legs to serve as a message to everyone else – L.A. is not a mob town.

This is when O’Mara finds out he isn’t the only honest cop in town – there’s at least five others. Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling) is a player who watches out only for himself, but has twin reasons to want to fight Cohen – one being Grace (Emma Stone), Cohen’s “etiquette” coach who he seduces. Harris (Anthony Mackie) is tired of seeing the blacks in L.A. hooked on heroin – and given the chance to help take down the main supplier, he jumps at it. Keeler (Giovanni Ribisi) was in army intelligence and is a tech wizard, and wants to tell his kids he fought against the bad men. Kennard (Robert Patrick) seems to have wandered in from a John Ford movie with his six shooter and dialogue. He is trailed around by Navidad Ramirez (Adam Beach), who is a Mexican, and that’s about all you learn about him. Together, these men wage war on Cohen – taking down his business, costing him money, and making him fume the whole time.

The film was directed by Ruben Flesicher, who made the excellent zombie comedy Zombieland a few years ago, and the less than excellent comedy 30 Minutes of Less after that. The style of Gangster Squad is pretty good – this isn’t supposed to be a realistic 1949 LA, but a stylized one. Many critics have compared to the movie (unfavorably) to The Untouchables, and that’s a decent comparison. But I thought more of Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy (1990), a formative movie for me (I was nine when it came out, and completely blown away). Both movies value style over substance, but at least Beatty’s film was immensely entertaining, with great comic book dialogue, and a cast who knew not to take the whole thing seriously. Gosling gets that to a certain extent here, and his performance is by far the most interesting. It isn’t exactly a good performance, but it’s far from boring. The rest of the cast though is dull. Normally, I like the no-nonsense approach of Josh Brolin. But as O’Mara, he is simply dull. Sean Penn goes wildly over the top as Mickey Cohen – not always a bad thing (see Al Pacino in Dick Tracy), but he’s also a killjoy. When you go that far over the top, you damn well better be fun to watch – and Penn isn’t. I did enjoy Nick Nolte’s performance - mainly because I’m enjoying all the recent Nolte performances, where he spits out one word at a time as if at any moment, he may just keep over and die. Unfortunately, he isn’t in the film very much.

Gangster Squad isn’t a horrible film. Fleischer tries to make it look good, and there are several good shootouts throughout the film. But it does feel like a film that is simply going through the motions. It is devoid of passion – or really any reason to exist. If you’ve seen a lot of gangster movies – and I have – you’ve seen this type of film countless times before, done a whole hell of a lot better.

Movie Review: Zombieland

Zombieland *** ½
Directed By: Ruben Fleischer.
Written By: Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick.
Starring: Jesse Eisenberg (Columbus), Woody Harrelson (Tallahassee), Emma Stone (Wichita), Abigail Breslin (Little Rock), Amber Heard (406), Bill Murray (Himself).

Does the zombie genre have anything left to offer us? Recently I saw the latest George A. Romero zombie movie, Survival of the Dead, and even he seems to be running low on ideas on what to do with the undead. In the recent Norwegian film, Dead Snow, they came up with the genius idea of Nazi zombies, but ended up making a supremely entertaining film, but one that did not bring anything new to the table. But Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland really does make the zombie film feel new and exciting again. Sure, it does not reinvent the wheel or anything, but what it does, it does brilliantly well. This is the most fun I have had at the movies in ages.

The movie opens with Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) filling us in on the rules he has on how to survive a zombie outbreak – and there are a lot of them, at current count 31. They include sensible things like being good at cardio, limbering up and wearing seatbelts. And also things like the double tap. Make sure to put an extra bullet into the head of a zombie just to make sure its dead. While most of Texas has turned into a desolate wasteland, where only zombies survive, Columbus has remained uninfected, mainly because he has no real friends or family, meaning he never let anyone get close enough to him to bite him. Now on the road to his hometown of Columbus, Ohio from Texas, he hopes his parents will be okay, even if he was never all that close to them in the first place. This is where he meets Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), his polar opposite.

If Columbus has survived the zombie outbreak by being over cautious with his rules, than Tallahassee has survived by being really good at killing zombies. He takes unnecessary risks, but always comes through unscathed because he kills zombies really well. He hates them with a passion because they killed his dog Buck. Now, he lives just to kill them. Tallahassee and Columbus are joined by two sisters – Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), who have survived because they trust no one. They get the upper hand on the two men not once but twice, by simply outsmarting them. But gradually, these four people form a bond – a trust – between them that lets them get through the outbreak together.

From the opening scene, Zombieland establishes its irreverent comedic tone and doesn’t let up for the entire running time of the movie. Columbus narrates the action, and in his pop culture infused, paranoid, hilarious rantings, we find that we actually quite like the dumb schmuck. The rest of the cast falls in the same way. Woody Harrelson is one of those actors whose grin can somehow be simultaneously goofy and creepy. He hasn’t been handed a lead role this good in a number of years, and he completely owns Tallahassee. Emma Stone continues her emergence as one of the best comedic actresses out there right now, giving Wichita a sexy, dangerous vibe on top, and a kittenish softness underneath. And Abigail Breslin proves that really, there is nothing she cannot do as a child actress. She is smart and funny, and no nearly as annoying or precocious as most child actresses are. She fits in with the rest of the cast.

What elevates Zombieland above most comedies is that it is consistently smart and funny. The characters do stupid things, sure (why the hell would you turn on all the lights at an amusement park in the dead of night when you are surrounded by the undead?), but the movie seems to know that its characters are stupid, and play into that. The brilliant sequence at Bill Murray’s house is among the best in any movie this year, giving Murray a chance to ham it up, and enjoy himself like he hasn’t in a while. I love the new, more serious Murray, but part of me will always be the kid who loved Ghostbusters, and loves to see Murray do this kind of work as well.

The film is directed by first timer Ruben Flesicher, from a screenplay by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, two writers who mostly worked on TV shows before this. But you wouldn’t know that these guys weren’t veterans. The writing is continuously smart and funny throughout, and the direction is willing to go just as far over the top as the actors do. Zombieland is one of the year’s most entertaining films.