Zombieland 2 Double Tap Review: Double the fun and double the gore…

A decade after Zombieland became a hit film and a cult classic, the lead cast: Woody Harrelson, who’d won an Emmy for Cheers in 1987; Abigail Breslin, who’d been nominated for an Oscar for Little Miss Sunshine in 2007; and Jesse Eisenberg and Emma Stone, who’ve racked up multiple Oscar nominations between them in the years since (Eisenberg for The Social Network in 2011; Stone for Birdman in 2015, La La Land in 2017, and The Favourite in 2019), and the happy-gun-toting family of the Apocalypse have reunited with director Ruben Fleischer (Venom) and the original writers Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick (Deadpool) for Zombieland: Double Tap.

For four years after its release, Zombieland was the highest-grossing zombie-related movie in the US. (World War Z knocked it off its perch in 2013.) And though The Walking Dead premiered in 2010 and quickly became the gold standard for zombie entertainment, if you prefer your zombies to be more comical than melodramatically gruesome (as we do), Zombieland is still a lot of fun in 2019, even though it has lost sparkle of its predecessor.

Crafted with the sort of fan service one might expect from a sequel to a much-loved fan favorite and In good old, Columbus fashion (Jessie Eisenberg) begins the movie by welcoming everyone back.

He explains what’s been going on for the last 10 years. He’s in a relationship with Wichita (Emma Stone), while Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) acts as kind of a surrogate father to Wichita’s little sister, who instead treats his surrogate daughter as both a little girl and a faithful zombie-killing sidekick. (His gifts for her are guns, always guns.) While, Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), although she’s not as enthusiastic about that as he is, and not so little, either.

They classify zombies in three different ways now, depending on the abilities of that particular walking dead. Fair enough – the slow-moving dumb ones are called “Homers,” after Homer Simpson – but it never really amounts to much in terms of the story, with the exception of a more-evolved type of zombie (T2) that’s harder to kill.

In the years that have elapsed, they’ve made their way to the White House, cleared out the zombies, put up barricades, and have been living in peace and tranquility among the relics of what once was the presidential home, where Donald Trump jokes go untold. (Only if you are American, will you get the one about William Howard Taft.) All in all, it’s a good life, Columbus tells us.

But after Columbus proposes, Wichita gets cold feet and takes off with Little Rock in search of a new place to live, where they meet Berkeley (Avan Jogia), a guitar-playing hippie pacifist – not exactly what you want in a world full of zombies, but Little Rock is desperate to meet someone her own age, so she’s willing to overlook it, and his sly charms.

Then Little Rock separates from Wichita, and everyone sets out on a road trip to find her. Wichita comes back to the White House for some help only to find that Columbus is now shacking up with the ditzy Madison (Zoey Deutch), who he and Tallahassee found surviving at the mall. The group heads out on a new road trip to reunite with Little Rock as evolved, harder-to-kill zombies continue to stalk the wasteland.

That single question sets off a series of adventures that almost gets the whole group killed and brings them into contact with other surviving humans, likely for the first time in ages. Everyone’s just looking for a forever home.

None of this prevents Double Tap from scoring some laughs, though it has to work harder for fewer of them. What felt like a fresh combination of characters 10 years ago — Eisenberg’s fussy nerdiness, Harrelson’s sensitivity-masking bravado, Stone’s no-nonsense sarcasm — now comes across as repetitive shtick.

What made Zombieland enjoyable was watching four strangers with clashing personalities forced to rely on one other to survive, and becoming friends along the way; that’s usually the main appeal to zombie movies, a key ingredient to the recipe. However, where Fleischer, Wernick, and Reese worked hard to make the original foursome interesting and likable, here new characters are never allowed to come within a mile of resembling anything like a real person.

Double Tap, introducing ancient comedy archetypes, like Madison, the dumb valley girl (who is wholly enjoyable), she is a one-note Valley Girl stereotype, played buoyantly by a game Zoey Deutch, who resembles a character from an early 00s sitcom, with every poorly written punchline landing the same – she’s an airhead, end of joke. Deutch has shined again and again in films like Vampire Academy, Everybody Wants Some!!, and Set It Up, and she steals every scene she’s in with. It’s a testament to Deutch’s sparky, committed performance, and some of the film’s best lines, that Madison endures.

But at the same time, the script’s potshots at hippies feel rusty: they love weed and hate guns. Cool. But weed will most likely get you killed in the Apocalypse (ahh, you won’t feel the bite, of course, or your intestines being ripped from your body), but smoking weed will make the world feel like a better place, unfortunately, guns will keep you safe in the end.

And then we have the two characters that strongly resemble the protagonists, in looks and personality, Thomas Middleditch and Luke Wilson. Wilson’s role is small, minor and unfortunately not fully-formed for the comedic actor to even have a bite on (but of course, the protagonists can’t see it). Of course, there is nothing wrong with silly stereotypes, nothing wrong with dumb comedy, and it’s amusing and dumb at the same time, but the film doesn’t take itself too seriously and the film flows nevertheless.

Rosario Dawson’s performance is stella as always and has a pivotal role at the end of the film, and in the time since the first movie, the term “Murraying” has even become a thing as Reno (Rosario Dawson) tells the group that it’s the phrase for anyone who’s killed because someone thinks they’re a zombie.

And that brings us to the big man, himself…

Bill Murray is just as synonymous with Zombieland as the core cast of Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, and Abigail Breslin. So when Zombieland: Double Tap screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick sat down a decade ago to dream up a sequel, they wanted to find a way to keep Murray in the mix, even though the fictionalized version of himself died in the original film.

How do you write Bill Murray into a film, when you have already killed Bill Murray off in the first film?

Simple.

Cue, a flashback scene to when Murray does make a surprise appearance in the end-credits scene flashing back to the day of the zombie outbreak, which occurred at a press junket where the actor was promoting a fictional Garfield 3. But that wasn’t the original plan from the writers, who had to tweak things over the past decade.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

Reuniting all four members of the original cast, number two adds some new talent (Rosario Dawson, Thomas Middleditch, Luke Wilson, and a superlative Zoey Deutch) for a tale about nothing, in particular, that’s still pretty entertaining. Double Tap is self-aware of its existence as a sequel, which is good and allows the film to play to its full potential.

And now watching its new sequel, Zombieland: Double Tap is a little like escaping back into 2009, in more ways than one. Still, Zombieland made waves for its clever and very gory spin on the zombie apocalypse genre that didn’t take itself too seriously.

Granted, the plot is a bit thin, the humor is a bit broad, the lesser characters are stereotypes, and things get wrapped up a bit too neatly in the end as our intrepid zombie slayers pair off. Double Tap is a romantic comedy first, zombie movie second, with a cluster of new zombie types, introduced and at a relatively brief 99 minutes, Zombieland is fast-pace, not entirely character-driven and sometimes repetitive, but it is fun.

4.5/5 STARS