BRAINLESS FUN

MOVIE
Zombieland: Double Tap
Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Abigail Breslin, Emma Stone
Director Ruben Fleischer
Review Ray Chan

IT’S hard to believe that it’s been 10 years since the original Zombieland broke new ground with a hilarious jaunt through the undead apocalypse.
    Remarkably, the four principal cast members return for the sequel looking hardly worse for wear, but they’re certainly wiser, having accrued either Oscar nominations or, in Stone's case, winning the coveted award itself in the intervening decade.
    With such a stellar group, it’s not surprising to see that the palpable chemistry within the fearsome and funny foursome has remained, although with Breslin’s Little Rock character excised from the group for most of the film, it sometimes feels like a vital part of the recipe is missing.
    Thankfully, you don’t need to have seen the forerunner – or if you’ve forgotten what transpired – to understand the basic premise of Eisenberg’s nerdy Columbus, Harrelson’s redneck Tallahasee and Stone (Wichita) and Breslin’s sister act banding together in a world infected with zombies.
    The creatures, it turns out, have evolved over time: now there are slow, stumbling corpses dubbed “Homers,” slightly more cunning flesh-eaters referred to as “Hawkings” (after Stephen), and hardier, almost invulnerable ones named after Terminator androids.
    Once again, the proceedings are narrated by Columbus, who acknowledges the passing of time by quipping “back for seconds?”
    His prodigious list of survival rules has become longer, often playfully emblazoned in the background, and the “zombie kill of the week” cutaways are still intact.
    It’s definitely a sequel that revives all the hits, but one that is embellished by two new additions: a chirpy blonde named Madison (Zoey Deutch) who’s been waiting out the “acropolis” in a walk-in freezer at a deserted shopping mall, and Rosario Dawson’s Nevada, the whiskey-drinking proprietor of an Elvis-themed hotel, who is as smart and savvy as Madison is dumb and ditzy.
    Indeed, Madison is such an annoyance for Tallahassee (Harrelson), that he proclaims “she’s still alive because zombies eat brains, and she doesn’t have any”.
    The storyline focuses on the group’s cross-country trip to find Little Rock, who ventures out on her own after meeting guitar-playing, Kumbaya-singing Berkeley (Avan Joglia).
    As if the notion of hearing that the girl he treats as his daughter has embarked on a romantic journey wasn’t terrible enough, the discovery that Berkeley is both a musician and a pacifist is enough to send Tallahassee into a rage, a performance capped off by Harrelson’s wonderful facial expressions.
    The climax takes place in a hippie peace-loving commune called Babylon, where weapons and survival skills are traded in for drum circles, patchouli, and bags of weed, and where Little Rock and Berkeley have sought sanctuary.
    When the enclave is attacked on by hordes of zombies, there’s no paucity of carnage in the ensuing free-for-all – nor in fact, throughout the entire movie – with plenty of Matrix-esque slo-mo gunplay, rotting dead walkers and multiple exploding heads aimed at raising the mirth level.
    And therein lies perhaps a moral conundrum: is it right to so blatantly slam the peaceniks while glorifying, and enjoying, the violence championed by Tallahassee? Can society just passively sit back and accept an attitude that makes light of such extreme aggression?
    But then again, people who don't appreciate the over-the-top scenes of brutality and bloodshed for the exaggerated caricatures that they are, probably won’t be lining up at the cinema for this anyway.
    If you do go, make sure you stay till the very end (and that means during and after the credits) for a call-back to the first chapter that’ll probably send you home grinning from ear to ear.


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