Zombieland: Double Tap

With this bunch (including the pink blonde), you wouldn’t be bored even if they just stood around talking at a bus stop. Even so, the screenwriters of the second Zombieland didn’t exactly overwork themselves. The film is a road movie with three stops where something happens just for a moment of amusement, not for moving some elaborate story forward, much less for enriching genre conventions. Even the imaginative pacifist smelting of weapons in Babylon was spoiled by the silly solution of the final problem with the zombie army. It’s okay for watching once, though. (26/11/2019)

The same thing as the first one, really. An entertaining premise and a couple of good formal ideas elaborated into the rumble of the four (five) likeable characters that doesn’t result in anything original. The great cast carry the film on their shoulders again, Flescher adds a few functional ideas, plus a couple of cameos to make things more interesting, and the viewer can kick-back and relax. And even though neither the characters nor the world go anywhere in the end, it’s impossible not to acknowledge that this innocent zombie silliness works surprisingly well – and like the previous, it deserves a strong 3*. (24/12/2019)

(SPOILER ALERT!) Zombieland offers a very decent intro, you cannot help laughing when you see the film's logo, then slowly but surely it leads to the badass finale, which ends with an incredibly funny tribute to the "unnamed ghostbuster". The second film may have some weaker spots, with too much talking, lecturing, shouting or spitting, but all of that is amply made up for by the large number of action and climactic scenes. The award for funniest character goes to the endearingly goofy "blonde from the freezer", and I was also very amused by the "doppelganger" sequence. In the end, it's a weaker four stars, but I can't say I was bored in the cinema, and that's the most important thing in a comedy. (29/10/2019)

In terms of content, this a clearly bad film. Its schematic, weak and sloppy story about the journey of the characters from point A to point B serves only as a necessary link for a series of comedy sketches and action scenes with zombies, all with fluctuating levels of quality. The film of course copies the first Zombieland, but this time it's all much simpler, more straightforward, more predictable and, overall, somewhat worse in all respects. Moreover, after ten years, the main characters have degraded to annoying one-dimensional caricatures. The film is fully aware that they are unbearable, but rather than doing anything about it, it uses these aspects as a source of humour (and builds a panopticon around them of deliberately annoying and exaggerated, demented side characters consisting of personalized stereotypes, so that the main characters appear more sympathetic to the audience). The film is partly saved by a fairly entertaining level of comedy, and in places by the actors, who obviously enjoyed filming it, which the audience can see. Only every third to fourth joke works, but with the huge cadence of gags, it doesn't matter much. (23/10/2019)

A complete sandbox of random episodes and situations spliced together with running jokes and quirky characters. It's horribly shot (the camera for the most part never goes beyond the foreground), poorly edited, and with incredibly lazy and cheap CGI (even the dead bodies by the roads are digitally added), but the whole thing is pulled off by the foursome of Harrelson, Stone, Breslin and Deutch (!!!) who are just a joy to watch as they shamelessly cow in front of the camera. Thankfully, the film doesn't irritate with confused episodicity, as it never once attempts any coherence throughout. It's very likely that with a different cast it would have been intolerable. Interestingly, the "geek" character of Jesse Eisenberg is the one who has least survived the decade-long outage, who with his neurotic pop culture references, is fit only to be thrown over the walls to be torn apart and eaten by the plebes from among Big Bang Theory fans. (22/01/2020)