Zombieland

In most zombie movies that don't go directly to DVD, the zombies themselves carry some kind of metaphorical weight. Zombies can stand for burgeoning youth disenchantment, mass consumer culture, or the world's permanent underclass, and that's just in George Romero movies. Even Zack Snyder's vapid remake of Dawn of the Dead had some post-9/11 resonance, with endless hordes of zombies standing in for a seemingly unstoppable flow of worldwide anti-American extremism. Then there's Ruben Fleischer's Zombieland, where the zombies exist almost entirely to provide life lessons to a skittish young nerd played by Jesse Eisenberg. Eisenberg learns to let go of his fears and embrace love, with pivotal scenes taking place at an amusement park. Zombieland is basically last year's coming-of-age movie Adventureland with zombies instead of 80s rock. Such a description may not sound promising, but Zombieland offers so many clever touches, such a smartly constructed screenplay, and a Jesse Eisenberg-portrayed protagonist who is vastly less annoying. Plus, it's amazing how much one's enjoyment of a film increases when Kristen Stewart is replaced by a gun-toting Woody Harrelson and thousands of ravenous zombies.

Zombieland starts in a post-apocalyptic world where a souped-up version of Mad Cow Disease has rendered most of the world's inhabitants into cannibalistic freaks. An intimate voice-over narration introduces a young college student and his idiosyncratic rules for surviving in the new zombie world order. Along the way, he hooks up with a psycho redneck played by Woody Harrelson who is having entirely too much fun creatively annihilating zombies, and a couple of sisters/con artists played by Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin. Eisenberg is a prototypical awkward fraidy cat in the Michael Cera mold. The zombie apocalypse gives him the chance to shed some of his phobias and hang-ups and take the risk of falling in love.

The whole set-up is remarkably light on zombies for most of the run time, much heavier on comic and romantic interplay between the characters. It's a bold choice that could have backfired horrendously among zombie-crazed genre fans, but it works impressively well. Part of the reason for that is Eisenberg's voice over, which allows for digressions and flash-backs that keep the proceedings kinetic, even in the absence of forward narrative momentum. Also, the snappy repartee is genuinely snappy, thanks to zippy lines and lived-in performances, especially by Woody Harrelson, who perfectly embodies the guy everyone would want by their side in the event of a zombie uprising, even if he's a bit...intense. Keeping the zombies at bay for long periods also means that when swarms of zombies finally do show up for the obligatory bullet-spraying climax, it's a welcome treat, rather than a rote adherence to formula.

Zombieland shows the enduring appeal of the zombie movie: they're basically blank, drooling, bloodthirsty lumps for a filmmaker to mold to their whim. Zom-Rom-Com has proven to be a durable and reliably entertaining subset of the genre.