It’s
been a decade since the wise-cracking zombie slayers of Zombieland burst
onto our screens making meta-references aplenty while gunning down the undead - but cool murders are old news now
and having these guys back years after everyone stopped caring is a bit of a mixed blessing.
On the one hand, after a decade
the world of zombie-comedy has moved on and simply being snappily dressed badasses (shout out to Woody Harrelson's Man With No Name cosplay at the film's beginning) with a
bunch of comedy rules isn’t really all that distinctive. On the other, it wasn’t
all that distinctive even back then and as this is basically just
rehashing the same old jokes, having a decade pass since we last heard them isn’t
such a bad thing.
Having moved into the remains of the White House, our ad hoc
family – Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), Wichita (Emma
Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin) – are falling into a rut, The
solution: the gals bail, leaving Columbus bereft and Tallahassee looking for
the exit himself.
Things get slightly more complicated with the discovery of
airhead survivor Madison (Zoey Deutch) and the news that Little Rock has run
off with (shudder) a hippie, but what follows is just another road trip movie with a
few decent jokes and some gory zombie-killing along the way.
The jokes are rarely hilarious but they're not painful either and the zombie gore is occasionally nasty enough to get a reaction even in 2019. But it's the chemistry between the cast (two-thirds of which barely seem to be trying to give a performance) that makes this work, even if it's just on the level of a hangout movie; imagine what they could do in a film that actually had something to say.
Maleficent:
Mistress of Evil
begins with the news that the previous film’s happy ending didn’t stick:
Maleficent (Angelina Jolie) is still feared and hated, even though the human Princess
(and her goddaughter) Aurora (Elle Fanning) now rules the fairy kingdom.
In
fact, she’s about to marry Prince Phillip (Harris Dickinson), which you’d think
would cement the bond between the humans and faeries and turn Maleficent into a
kind of grumpy aunt figure. But no: Phillip’s mother Queen Ingrith (Michelle Pfeiffer)
has other plans which largely involve a surprisingly distressing amount of murder.
For
such a straightforward story this seems overstuffed with incidents in a way
that usually suggests a tortured screenwriting process; for one, it seems Maleficent is
part of an entire ecosystem of flying humans who add almost nothing to the
story but do make for good cannon fodder during the lengthy battle sequence at
the climax.
Also, and this can't be stressed enough, this is a film that's largely about the wholesale slaughter of every fairy Ingrith's sinister forces can lure into a trap (though the trap does involves some over-the-top organ playing, so it's not all bad news). This probably isn't aimed at little kids, but if they do wander in they might be a little distressed by some of this.
Presumably the creative team thought that the only way Maleficent could look (relatively) good was by making the humans into crazed mass murderers, which suggests perhaps the whole idea of this sequel was somewhat flawed. Wasn't the fun of Maleficent that she was a baddie who didn't really give a crap?
At least Jolie gets a handful of opportunities to be arch and bitchy which are
easily the best part of the film; her slightly feral performance throughout
suggests an actor putting more thought into her character than the script did. Pfeiffer also does some (slightly more subdued) scenery chewing and a bunch
of CGI creatures get to look cute.
Even for a film as jumbled as this one, the big mystery here is exactly why a fairy tale movie needed to go full-on war movie by the end - unless they had a bunch of Star Wars CGI animators handy with nothing better to do. Considering the potential much of this film shows, they still should have had something better to do than another big battle sequence.
- Anthony Morris
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