Zombieland Review
Zombieland is downright delightful. Somewhat surprisingly, a movie about a post-apocalyptic cross-country road trip through an undead nation converted almost entirely into legions of the cannibalistic undead is really about the simple pleasures in life: stuff getting destroyed in balletic slow motion, cowboy heroes wielding John_Woo-style double hand cannons, and of course, Twinkies. Pair these timeless themes with solid zombie-centric humor, and you've got comedy-horror gold.
The cowboy hero in question (Woody_Harrelson) goes by the name Tallahassee, since that's where he's headed when he runs into the main character (Jesse_Eisenberg) -- whom we call Columbus -- on one of America's now countless abandoned highways. It's been a couple of months since your basic bite-borne rage virus swept the country, but there are still a few stragglers left uninfected, like Columbus, who gets by on the paranoid nature that once made him a shut-in, and Tallahassee, who gets by on pure badassery. Soon, they meet up with a couple of sisters, Wichita and Little Rock (Emma_Stone and Abigail_Breslin), and the quartet ends up driving west together.
Along the way, they engage in some intensely hilarious comedy dialogue -- stuff so clever and well orchestrated that it often transcends the audience's line between laughter and full-on glee. In fact, the humor could hold up even without the gloriously gratifying zombie action sequences, but the movie's handling of the ass-kicking and gore is top-notch anyway. Director Ruben_Fleischer deserves major credit for clearly knowing intuitively how to work a double barrel shotgun, a Garden Weasel, and a zombified clown into a scene for maximum satisfaction. With such a solid grasp of both the wonderfully funny and the awesomely violent, it looks like Fleischer is wielding his own pair of action hero-style pistols, and we get the pleasure of watching him know just how to use them. Cammila Albertson, Rovi
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