Movie review: 'Zombieland'

Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin and Woody Harrelson (Credit: Glen Wilson/Sony)

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3 1/2 stars (out of four)

Warts, entrails and all, I had a ball at “Zombieland.” It’s 81 minutes of my kind of stupid.

 The premise gives you absolutely nothing new in terms of what zombies do, or look like, or run like, and the genre’s more stringent aficionados may get sniffy when confronted with a modest, high-spirited gore comedy. But I laughed more often, and harder, at the best gags here than I did with any number of other comedies this year. And there’s something inherently droll about plunking down Jesse “More Deadpan Than Michael Cera, Even” Eisenberg into an extreme scenario like this.

To wit: Zombie plague; country destroyed; very few humans left. Honing the dry comic skills he brought to “Adventureland” (what’s next for this guy — the Holy Land?), Eisenberg plays a kid from Columbus, Ohio, who joins shotgunning, head-splattering forces with the top-billed Woody Harrelson, having a high old time as humankind’s last best hope. Making their way west, killing when and where they must, they meet Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin (as fellow survivors) and in 10 of the funniest minutes on-screen this year, once they make it to L.A. the quartet takes an unscheduled meeting with none other than Bill Murray, played by Bill Murray.

It’s less a road movie than a road-kill movie. The climactic amusement-park melee sags a bit, to be sure. You’ll find no George A. Romero social satire in Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick’s script, nor any “Shaun of the Dead” meta-commentary. It’s coarser than that. I missed the film’s opening minutes the first time I saw it, and catching up with its introductory scenes at a later screening, I was disappointed “Zombieland” ladled on the violence so heavily straight out of the gate.

Yet it’s a strangely high-spirited lark, giving all of its leading players plenty to eviscerate in between sweet nothings and wisecracks. First-time director Ruben Fleischer has a promising future in both comedy and action, and the way he uses slow-motion for laughs in the opening credits, he nearly makes up for the humorless, beyond-parody way Michael Bay relies on it in his neck of the woods. Is “Zombieland” for everyone? Uh, no. Not everyone will be amused by  a Charlie Chaplin zombie stalking the sidewalk in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre post-apocalypse. But humor is a funny thing, and occasionally a bloody thing, and now and then you find a comedy that offers some wit to go with the innards.

mjphillips@tribune.com

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