Review: Zombieland 2: Double Tap

After the events of the first film, our protagonists are holed up in the abandoned White House, having a pretty fun time, actually. Eventually, the plot kicks in as Little Rock (Abigail Breslin) leaves the group to hook up with a bunch of hippies. This concerns the other three greatly, as they head out in search of her. The first stop is Graceland, which Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) is especially happy to visit, and he meets fellow survivor and fellow Elvis fan Nevada (Rosario Dawson). The trail eventually leads them to a hippie commune called Babylon (isn’t it always Babylon?), and it’s about this point that the zombies turn up en masse. A giant horde of zombies and they’re in the one place where weapons are discouraged. Yikes. Zoey Deutch turns up as a bubbleheaded girl who Columbus allows himself to be flattered by when mad at Wichita (Emma Stone) briefly abandons him, post-marital proposal. That’s gonna be a nice, calm situation isn’t it?

 

The first “Zombieland” was one of my top 3 films of 2009, and managed to make me interested in a zombie comedy for once, given how goddamn many there have been over the years. There certainly seems to be way too damn many of them since the overrated “Shaun of the Dead”, and it certainly wasn’t close to the first zombie comedy, was it? Still, despite my even lesser interest in seeing another zombie comedy now than back in 2009, I could imagine how a sequel to “Zombieland” could’ve been, if not original certainly clever, interesting, and entertaining. There’s plenty of things that could’ve been done for a valid sequel here. Returning director Ruben Fleischer (“Zombieland”, “Gangster Squad”) unfortunately decides to mostly just repeat everything that made the first film work, but with much, much less skill this time around, and much, much less entertainment value as well. Welcome to one of the most disappointing films of 2019.

 

Despite being a virtual repeat of the first film, almost nothing works this time. For one thing, the film stops dead in the first act, which is mostly devoted to our protagonists piss-farting around at the abandoned White House. They do nothing interesting there, nor do they say anything interesting there. We have a barely animated corpse of a movie before it even truly starts, the plot and action take forever to kick into gear. Jesse Eisenberg plays the same character as in the first film yet is unlikeable this time. Even his Mark Zuckerberg was more genial. Woody Harrelson gives essentially the same performance as in the first film yet is boring this time. That’s something I never thought Woody Harrelson was capable of being. Abigail Breslin spends too much of the film MIA, Emma Stone doesn’t spend enough of the film MIA. She’s in perpetually snarky Resting Bitch Face mode yet again, after a couple of interesting turns in “Magic in the Moonlight” and the otherwise terrible “The Favourite”. The two people whose presence I did enjoy here, are relegated to tiny supporting role (the always lovely Rosario Dawson, her bountiful charm wasted for the millionth time) and postscript cameo (Bill Murray, less funny this time) status, respectively. As for new recruit Zoey Deutch, she’s imitating Reese Witherspoon in “Legally Blonde”, and it’s a thousand times less funny in 2019 than it was in whenever the hell that overrated comedy came out. Sure, she’s cute as a button, but the schtick was old before Witherspoon touched it (1983’s “Valley Girl”, anyone? Julie Brown’s entire career perhaps?).

 

It’s probably not so much Fleischer or the cast’s problem, rather the limp screenplay by Dave Callaham (“The Expendables”,  2014’s disappointing “Godzilla”), Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick (who teamed up previously for “Zombieland” and the overrated “Deadpool”), who just don’t try hard enough here to take the story anywhere interesting or unique. Yes, the ‘Homer’ is funny, as is the ‘Zombie Kill of the Year’. However, those are still riffs on the first film, I wouldn’t even call it a new wrinkle in the formula. Neither is using a different Metallica song this time. There’s only one scene in the film that isn’t a riff on the original film: Luke Wilson and Thomas Middleditch as the ‘bizarro world’ version of Harrelson and Eisenberg. Yes, it’s a riff on “Seinfeld”, but at least it’s not stealing anything from the first film. The film is gory, but so what? I didn’t care because I was taken out of the film in the first act and never found my way back in.

 

Who thought this is what we wanted to see from a “Zombieland” sequel? A tired re-tread that takes forever to get going and doesn’t go anywhere terribly amusing. Some nice gore here and there, probably more than the first film. I need a lot more than that to keep me invested, however.. It’s good-looking, but that’s about it. No, this simply will not do. It’s pretty much useless. Fans have already seen it done better, non-fans are unlikely to watch a sequel to a film they weren’t a fan of in the first place.

 

Rating: C-