Dead Funny

The comparison to Shaun of the Dead is inevitable, so let’s get it out of the way: Zombieland is kinda sorta Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright’s comic masterpiece of mayhem after the undead apocalypse done up American-style, so instead of cricket bats as weapons and jokes about tea, it’s shotguns as anti-zombie devices and a quest to find the last Twinkie.

But Zombieland — from delightfully outta-nowhere director Ruben Fleischer and screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick — is not a simple redo or rip-off. Shaun was more sly and more poignant, in the end; Zombieland has no time for cunning or the gentler emotions when there’s the walking — and frequently running — undead to be dispatched posthaste.

For a moment, this outrageously violent and outrageously funny movie had me worrying that I’d finally succumbed to the peculiar sort of zombification afflicting our culture of late. We invented an entire subgenre of movies that allows putative heroic characters to kill with impunity because those being killed are already dead. Shouldn’t we be disturbed by this? Doesn’t this mean we’re irredeemably f---ed up?

And then I simply stopped worrying about it and went on laughing my ass off.

Zombieland skips over the reasons that hungry corpses are suddenly walking the land, past the initial moments of the crisis, and dumps us into the long aftermath. Our unnamed protagonist, a sweet dweeb played by the charming Jesse Eisenberg, introduces us to his rules for survival in Zombieland — and I won’t ruin them for you. Suffice to say that Our Unlikely Hero has 31 rules, and events shall transpire that cause him to amend some of them.

While wandering lonely across the burnt-out highways of America, the sweet dweeb runs into an ass-kicking Twinkie lover (Woody Harrelson, whose smirk has never felt more appropriate or more welcome), who refuses to give his name but invites Our Unlikely Hero to call him Tallahassee, after his destination; he dubs the sweet dweeb Columbus, after his. Soon, they’ve joined up with Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), and they all keep their destination-names even though they decide to head somewhere else. They’ve all seen post-apocalyptic movies and dismiss the rumors of a zombie-free paradise out West. But there’s another place that might be fun to strike out for...

My only quibble with Zombieland is this: A plot point turns on the theft of cars and guns from other non-zombie people, but why steal a car at the end of the world? Is it just a way to interact with another live person without the danger of getting too intimate in a positive way? It’s a minor quibble, really, and not much of problem, for the rest of the film is so despicably, so wonderfully amusing. It’s still wily enough to let what could be its best visual joke slip by so quickly that you might miss it, which makes the noticing of it that much more fun. (And it makes me wonder what other jokes I did, in fact, miss.) And it plays up what could be its most shocking moment with exactly the right blend of impudence and absurdity and tragi-comedy that you’ll be marveling that Fleischer and Co. even conceived of it, never mind got away with it.

But they do. Cuz this is Zombieland, and all the rules are off. Except for those 31, of course.