Zombies

Zombieland

Directed by Ruben Fleischer. Written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick. With Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin. (R)

There are, more or less, two distinct sub-genres of zombie movies: the siege picture, in which the interest is chiefly in seeing how a group of people function (or don’t) while barricaded in a building besieged by zombies (Night of the Living Dead, most of Shaun of the Dead); and post-apocalyptic road pictures like 28 Days Later, in which a group of survivors forms a new family while exploiting the advantages of everyone else being dead. (Dawn of the Dead marries both subgenres by having the survivors hide out from zombies in a shopping mall.) Two indispensable stops in a zombie road movie are the supermarket and the abandoned mansion, both of which are made in the knowing zombie satire Zombieland.

Our guide through Zombieland is Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) a nervous, anxiety-plagued 20-year-old virgin (was Michael Cera unavailable?) who has managed to survive a zombie holocaust with a long list of rules that are displayed, in a visual conceit that never gets old, on pavement, cars, or just hanging in the air. Trying to hitchhike home to Ohio he meets Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson, sending up his role in Natural Born Killers as a psychotic zombie hunter), and in the aforementioned supermarket they run into grifters Wichita and Little Rock (Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin), with whom they spar all the way to Los Angeles, where they end up crashing in the mansion of a very famous movie star thanks to one of those maps of the stars’ homes. (For more of that very famous movie star, stick around through the closing credits.)

Even in a genre that thrives on characters having really bad ideas like partying in a graveyard, the girls’ destination, an amusement park, is particularly implausible. Like most horror films these days, Zombieland is more interested in grossing out its audience than scaring it, and a little suspense would have gone a long way. But if you’ve ever wanted to see the kid from Little Miss Sunshine shooting zombies, here’s your chance.

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