‘Zombieland: Double Tap’ is more comedy than horror. In fact, for a movie so surprisingly sly and adept at tongue-in-cheek laughs, the biggest joke is an inside one; for a concept in which characters are dodging creatures who crave brains, so FEW brains are needed to enjoy this one.
Ten years after the original, I think it says a lot about the blast of a ride that IS ‘Zombieland’ that all major players return to reprise their roles….’cause let’s face it, some of them have added some pretty stellar work to their resume since, primarily Emma Stone who won an Academy Award for ‘La La Land’ and Woody Harrelson, who has been nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar not once but twice. This one probably won’t add any hardware to any of their respective mantles, but something tells me none of them care. It’s fun, and that’s that.
At the beginning of this sequel, we find the four butt kicking survivors of the zombie apocalypse (Harrelson’s Tallahassee, Jesse Eisenberg’s Columbus, Stone’s Wichita and Abigail Breslin’s Little Rock) pulling up residence in the White House….yes THAT White House. But there’s trouble in the nest; Little Rock, desperate to be around people her own age, runs away, hooking up with a Berkeley (Avan Jogia), a guitar-strumming, weed-smokin’ hippie. It isn’t long until big sister Wichita hits the road to find her and, once the gang learns that there are more advanced zombies out there, it’s an all-out rescue mission, in which we meet some additional loopy humans, including Madison (Zoey Deutch), a ditzy glam girl who has survived by living in the freezer of a Pinkberry, Nevada (Rosario Dawson), a tough lady running an Elvis-themed motel near Graceland, plus Albuquerque (Luke Wilson) and Flagstaff (Thomas Middleditch), creepy dopplegangers of Tallahassee and Columbus.
Again, it’s more about comfortable camaraderie than clever cinema; if there’s anything director Ruben Fleischer does better than find creative ways to kill zombies (and trust me, the combine harvester was a pretty good one) it’s making his heroes come across breezy, cheeky and very easy to cheer for. Is it bloody? Heck ya. But it’s also a bloody good time.