Crank as the Ultimate Video Game Movie

I’ve finally ended my reign as the last American male who hasn’t seen the movie Crank. I don’t remember the original or its even zanier sequel getting all that much attention when it first came out, but it seems that both have attained minor cult status on video, and it’s easy to see why: like all the best genre movies, both Crank and Crank 2: High Voltage relish their B-movie status, throwing all verisimilitude, logic, and dramatic pretensions out the window in favor of pure, anarchic fun. It’s the kind of attitude that made this year’s Zombieland work so well, and it’s the formula that many of the most beloved action and horror films, from the Evil Dead series to the cream of the Hong Kong action crop, do so well. It’s such a simple plan that it’s surprising it’s not employed more often: start your movie off with a bang, and then don’t let up ‘til the credits roll.

I’m a little late to the party on this one, so I’m not going attempt to review or discuss either of these films in the more traditional sense. I do want to try and tackle their style, though, because while watching them it occurred to me that these two films seem to encapsulate the so-called “video game aesthetic” as well as anything I’ve seen. In the past, a “video game” movie was something like 1995’s Mortal Kombat, or 1994’s utterly forgettable Street Fighter (which has the depressing honor of being Raul Julia's last movie); that is, movies adapted from video games. In recent years, though, some directors have started employing the feel and construct of games as a recognizable filmmaking style. Crank appears to be the exemplar. Directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor are using this aesthetic at every turn throughout both movies, and while the effects are probably jarring or even confusing to people that didn’t grow up with Nintendo, for those that did, it’s too obvious to ignore.

Right from the beginning, Neveldine and Taylor cue their audience in to the kind of style they’re using. The opening credits are done in a blatant arcade game mode, complete with old school 32-bit graphics and Donkey Kong-style sound effects. When they finally do cut to the first scene of the movie, it’s a point-of-view shot of hit man Chev Chelios (Jason Statham, proving why he deserves two action movie franchises) waking up in his apartment to find that he’s been injected with the “Beijing Cocktail,” a mixture of decidedly un-groovy drugs that is slowly stopping his heart.

This opening scene works like a video game in two ways: the first is that it’s the classic “cut scene” that seems to open every action video game. That is--introduce the hero, let us know what his problem is, and then on to the ass-kicking. Some movies have used this method--Commando comes to mind--but traditionally they require a lot more throat-clearing in the form of character introductions and exposition before they really get down to business. Video games have always eschewed that kind of backstory out of necessity, since anything the person playing the game can’t control is really just filler, and needs to be dispensed with as fast as possible. The fact that Crank does the same is a definite clue as to what kind of movie you’re about to experience.

The second key aspect of the opening scene is that it sets the stage for a particular style of framing--establishing Statham as a video game hero who is essentially being “played” by the movie--that the filmmakers are to use throughout both films. For the rest of Crank, and in Crank 2, he’ll often be shot in a very deliberate and almost intentionally stilted style that is designed to recreate the look of a character within a game. Here, the idea is point-of-view, the kind of style used in so-called “first-person shooter” video games. But Neveldine and Taylor often employ a third-person style, as well, in the form of tracking shots that follow just behind Chelios as he walks down the street. Of course, the whole of both movies is not shot in this fashion, but even when they’re not using a particular type of video game framing, both Crank films take a cue from the particular set-design and set up of action video games.

The most notable example occurs at the beginning of Crank 2, when Chelios, still alive but now sporting an artificial heart with the battery on empty, escapes from the Chinese gangsters who were holding him hostage. He makes his way out into a kind of industrial park, where a collection of shipping containers have been stacked and arranged in such a way as to create a makeshift maze. Naturally, there are roving groups of armed guards, who Chelios both avoids and guns down at will. This kind of situation--where equal amounts of stealth and fighting are required--is found time and again in video games, and the style of filming, which again employs a healthy dose of centered third-person framing, is one of the franchise’s most obvious nods of the head to the arcade aesthetic. The shipping containers are also a nice touch. I’m not sure what it is, but in my experience every action video game--and quite a few movies, as well--have at least one sequence in a compound filled with shipping containers.

There are plenty of other video game elements to Crank worth studying, from the Godzilla-inspired fight sequence in the second film to the movie’s use of a map--courtesy, apparently, of Google Earth--to zip from one location to another throughout Chelios’ frenetic dash to get revenge, but I’ll let them be for now. The overall point is that these movies, juvenile though they may be, do seem to represent a small step forward for filmmakers interested in trying to mix media, whether it’s with music videos, computer animation, or video games. In the past, a “video game movie” was a movie that just borrowed hackneyed characters, plot lines, and elements from titles out of the Sega Genesis catalogue. But now it might refer more to a particular style, feel, and tone that’s more referential--oddly postmodern, even--than it is anything else. The purist in me wants to say that anything that contaminates the precious style of movies as they are is a definite step in the wrong direction, but as long as this kind of stuff is here to stay, it might as well be done right. And Crank, for whatever else you might say about it, gets the genre of the absurd, R-rated action movie oh so very right.

The New Great American Director?

Recently, I finally got a chance to see Goodbye Solo, the third movie from director Ramin Bahrani. Like both of his previous films, Chop Shop and Man Push Cart, it’s gotten rave reviews from all the major critics, including Roger Ebert, who proclaimed Bahrani “the new great American director” in the intro to this excellent interview from March of this year.

Whether or not Bahrani is going to go down as a pioneering filmmaker is too early to say, but Goodbye Solo certainly isn’t going to hurt his chances. Like Chop Shop, it’s a marvelously realized movie that attaches the heaviest of implications to what might seem like a small, simple story. It’s all buoyed by a mesmerizing performance from Souleymane Sy Savane as the title character, an immigrant cab driver who forms an unlikely friendship with an embittered old man, played by (no kidding) former Elvis bodyguard Red West.

There’s certainly no denying Bahrani has only gotten more accomplished with each movie he’s made, and after only three films he’s already established a recognizable style and set of preoccupations. Watching Goodbye Solo I kept thinking of the final scene in Dirty Pretty Things, another movie that followed the plight of immigrants, in which Chiwetel Ejiofor’s character describes himself and others like him as “the people you don’t see.” That seems as concise a definition as any of the kinds of films Bahrani makes. He follows food cart operators, poor families, and cab drivers, and finds in their stories the kind of poetry that usually only shows up in the work of other so-called “great” directors like Herzog and Bresson.

The most interesting thing about Bahrani is that he’s built his reputation solely on his brilliance as a storyteller. Usually, the young directors with the most heat on them are those with the flashiest style or the most audacious plot structures. Bahrani’s plots are audacious, but only in their elegance of execution. Whether you like his movies or not, those are the kinds of films that tend to stand the test of time. And while I still wouldn't proclaim him the next great thing in American movies, he’s certainly making the case with each film he puts out.

In The Company of Men (1997)

Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men follows two mid-nineties corporate types--complete with wacky ties--who’ve just been dumped by their longtime girlfriends. To collectively get back at the opposite sex, they come up with a particularly devilish plan: while on a six-week business trip in fly-over country, they will simultaneously begin dating the same woman, gain her affection, and then unexpectedly blow her off and skip town (it may be juvenile, but I couldn’t help being reminded of The Dennis System). It’s the kind of thing that inadvertently happens in countless relationships, but the kicker here, of course, is that the two bastards are doing it on purpose.

The duo involved in this nefarious scheme couldn’t be more different. Chad, played with a really despicable gusto by Aaron Eckhart, is an unapologetic misogynist who sees people as pawns and dupes to be played for all they’re worth. He puts off the impression of being just a fast-talking, opportunistic jock--the kind of guy whose handshake is always a bit too strong--but by the end of the movie your not likely to think of him as anything other than an out-and-out sociopath. Howard (Matt Malloy), meanwhile, is an unassuming, bookish-looking middle manager, but LaBute establishes early on that he likes to think he’s every bit the smooth operator that Chad is. Together, they decide to take on the task of breaking the heart of Christine (Stacey Edwards, who is terrific), a shy, good-hearted typist who works in their building and--oh yeah--also happens to be deaf. No one could accuse LaBute of pulling any punches when it comes to taking his comedy extra black.

This may all sound too dark to take, and at times it is, but on the whole LaBute manages to balance the woman-hating style of his lead characters with a healthy dose of satire, not only of masculinity and the vampiric nature of some modern relationships, but of corporate culture in general (Chad, for one, seems like he would fit right in with Patrick Bateman and company from American Psycho--which would make a fitting, if not uncomfortable, double feature with this film). It all amounts to an unusually good exploration of why bad people do the things they do, which is a much tougher trick to pull off than it sounds. I remember once hearing a critic say that this movie encapsulates the whole notion of “the banality of evil” as good as anything outside of the Coen Bros. canon, and I think they have a point. LaBute seems fascinated by the duplicitous behavior that outwardly upstanding people are capable of, and it's something he’s explored throughout his career. In fact, his recent effort The Shape of Things seems nothing if not an expansion of the ideas he’s playing with here. (That film, interestingly, is told not from the point of view of the victimizer but of the victim, who, even more interestingly, happens to be a man.)

My only problem with In the Company of Men, outside of the grating-but-sparse jazz score, is LaBute’s visual style. It’s become sort of a joke at this point that no director who comes to film by way of theatre (as LaBute did) can ever display even the most minimal deftness of visual style, and he’s no different. The film is all static shots and takes so over-long that the actors occasionally stumble over their lines. I wish I could say that this insular style allows us to focus in on the gleefully mean-spirited nature of LaBute’s dialogue, but really it's just off-putting and sometimes a bit tedious. Still, In the Company of Men provides more than enough substance to get over its lack of style. This includes a real killer of an ending--the kind of scene that’s bound to stay with you, probably for a few days longer than you’d like it to.

Whatever Works (2009)

Woody Allen’s Whatever Works is based on a script he wrote in the seventies and never filmed, and he supposedly made it on the quick right before the SAG strike (which, of course, never actually happened). Critics were hard on the movie, and in many ways it’s easy to see why: it’s got that haphazard quality that so many of Woody’s movies (Anything Else, Hollywood Ending, Melinda and Melinda) have had in recent years, and what interesting points it does make have arguably already been covered in better movies of his like Manhattan and Annie Hall. Yet for all these criticisms (most of which are entirely valid), Whatever Works still manages to, well, work, thanks in part to its lovely tone and feel. There’s no denying that it’s a resoundingly imperfect effort, but it still only serves as further proof of the argument that, for all his faults, Allen still makes the most watchable, breezy films of any modern director.

In classic Allen fashion, the film traces the story of Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David), a misanthropic New Yorker who abandoned his old life as a near-Nobel laureate physicist to live in a shabby apartment and teach chess to children, who, like everyone else, he refers to as “morons” and “inchworms.” Boris’s insular life takes a strange turn when he decides to let Melody St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood), a young runaway from Mississippi, crash at his place while she searches for a job. Even though he insults her constantly, the impressionable young Melody takes a strange liking to Boris, and soon the two strike up a very unlikely romance.

Like all Allen movies, Whatever Works is much more about character than plot, but what is strange about it is which characters end up being the most compelling. The film suffered from a pretty terrible trailer that served up the particularly egregious Southern accents of Wood, Patricia Clarkson and Ed Begley, Jr. (as her fundamentalist parents) front and center. To watch it, you would’ve thought that David’s classic Allenian cynic would be the film’s only saving grace, but the reality turns out to be quite the opposite. It is Wood and Clarkson who turn out to be the funniest characters as the naive Southern belles transformed by the culture of New York City, and David, for all his obvious talent, seems left rushing to catch up. He looks the part of the elitist genius just fine, but his performance here seems the final proof that his particular brand of comedy is best absorbed in thirty minute installments on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Like his famous collaborator Jerry Seinfeld, it’s pretty clear he’s no actor, but he works around this fault whenever he’s in the looser construct of his own show. The same cannot be said for his work in this film. He’s funny. He reads his lines well. But that’s just it--for a guy who’s true skill is improv, everything he does here ends up feeling just a little too rehearsed.

David doesn’t get much help from Allen, who affects one of the most flat directorial styles of his career to tell his story. This was a problem of his in the nineties, but you would have been forgiven for thinking he’d turned a corner with recent work like Match Point and Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Unfortunately, his go-to method here is to shoot everything like a stage play. It’s a style he no doubt does better than most, but all it does is highlight David’s shortcomings and add a dangerous air of shallowness to every philosophical statement--and there are many--that his script tries to make.

All these faults are much more apparent than they should be, but the film miraculously manages to stay afloat thanks to the twisted positivity of Allen’s world view. It seems odd to say it, but Whatever Works, for all its talk of the hopelessness of humanity and suicide (which Boris attempts twice--to comic effect), is one of the most feel-good movies I’ve seen in a long time. Allen has always positioned himself as one of film culture’s most staunch neurotics, but if this film proves anything about him, it’s that he’s also a hopelessly positive person, well aware of what he sees as the gentle indifference of the world, but also aware that this means the impetus for happiness is always in the hands of the individual. As the title suggests, for Allen the key to happiness is for each person to find and hold on to whatever small bit of goodness works for them. This idea is reflected throughout the movie, which only manages to get away with having such mean-spirited (Boris) and dim-witted (Melody) characters because it refuses to judge them. That it does it all with Allen’s trademark clever dialogue and razor sharp wit is what really makes it special. There is certainly a danger that goes hand-in-hand with this approach, as it’s easy to worry that Allen could be starting to skate away from the kind of material that made something like Crimes and Misdemeanors so good and toward a style that is just...pleasant. For the time being, though, it’s enough to keep me coming back for more.

The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009)

The Men Who Stare at Goats opens with a title card that reads: “More of this is true than you would believe.” I’ll admit that this kind of playful hedge is a great way to start a movie whose centerpiece is a military unit that trains its soldiers to read minds and walk through walls. It works because at the same time that the story told here strains all possible levels of credibility, anyone who knows anything about our government’s history of whacked out secret research and black ops knows that when it comes to wasting tax payer dollars, those in charge are forever outdoing themselves.

With such a solid, satire-ready backdrop (courtesy of a book by the English writer Jon Ronson) and a cast of old pros, it would seem that the makers of The Men Who Stare at Goats were halfway to an interesting movie before they even shot any film. But director Grant Heslov and screenwriter Peter Straughan disappointingly decide just to let the momentum of their larger-than-life premise--that in the early 80s, the U.S. Army attempted to build a unit of super-soldiers with psychic powers--carry their film. Time after time, they go for the easy hooks and the obvious jokes, seemingly so enamored with the oddness of their pitch that they forget to ever construct a story worthy of living up to it. This is an approach that was destined to produce a good trailer--which The Men Who Stare at Goats most certainly has-- but the end result can only be described as one of the most conventional movies about an unconventional subject ever made.

The story starts by introducing Bob Wilton, a small town reporter played by Ewan McGregor, who still hasn’t quite mastered that American accent he keeps getting forced to use. After Wilton’s wife leaves him for his one-armed editor-- a plot point that this film finds to be absolutely hilarious-- he takes off for Iraq with vague aspirations of becoming an embedded journalist. While languishing in a Kuwaiti hotel, he encounters Lyn Cassady (Clooney), an eccentric soldier who claims to have formerly been a part of the “First Earth Battalion,” a top-secret Army project to turn everyday grunts into what he calls “Jedi warriors.” Thinking this could be just the story he’s looking for, Wilton takes up with Cassady, who explains that he’s there on a mission, and the two head off into the desert toward Iraq.

Right from the beginning, The Men Who Stare at Goats sets up more than a few roadblocks for itself. The first is that it relies extensively on narration from McGregor’s character, who begins the film in cringe-inducing fashion by introducing himself and his story (“my name is Bob Wilton...), and then goes on to relate Cassady’s tale of government experimentation and new age military tactics. Rather than helping to create context or giving the film a chance to crack a few wry jokes, as I’m sure it does in Ronson’s book, all the narration ultimately does here is muddle up the plot and keep things at an arm’s length from having any real impact or meaning. It necessitates using a great deal of flashbacks, linear shuffling, and cut scenes, and these only succeed in making the film superficial and cursory, as though every scene has been severely cut down to size. For example, the story of how the First Earth Battalion’s stoned-out, hippie leader Bill Django (Jeff Bridges) conceived of the idea for the unit after being shot in a rice paddy in Vietnam could have been one of the funniest, most interesting parts of the film, but all we’re given is a clichéd montage showing him tuning in, turning on, and dropping out by frolicking through a field in a sari and doing yoga. I suppose it’s worth saying that Bridges is still great, as he always is. He gets all the best lines here and succeeds in building an interesting character, but the film’s superficial handling of his part of the story forces him to the periphery, and what could have been a legitimately funny character ends up feeling like a half baked version of The Dude.

If the flashbacks of the First Earthers and their training never gets going, the film’s present day story is even worse. Subplots are introduced left and right--Cassady and Wilton are captured by Iraqi’s, Robert Patrick shows up as the head of a mercenary company--but all it amounts to is the cinematic equivalent of running in place. We don’t get any meaningful insights into Clooney’s character’s story from these scenes, and all each additional minute spent with McGregor does is prove how shoddily carved a character Bob Wilton really is. McGregor is doing his best to keep up, injecting a little fire into the role whenever he can, but his character is an audience proxy if there ever was one. The characters eventually get back on track with their quest, and all this somehow culminates in a clash with Kevin Spacey, who is introduced as a late substitute for an antagonist and given very little to do. A rushed attempt at a plot is forged, but it’s definitely a case of too little too late.

What’s strange about The Men Who Stare at Goats is that no part of it is that offensively bad, poorly acted, or even boring-- it’s just that there’s nothing to it. I could have written off the paper-thin story and the boggy narrative if the film had been funny--satire is often about small moments and individual scenes-- but that just wasn’t the case. Heslov and company’s default mode is to go with the obvious and inoffensive, which ultimately amounts to ninety minutes of them pointing at their characters and saying “Hey! Aren’t these guys weird!?” They’re happy to take a swing at anything that comes right down the middle of the plate, from cold war hysteria and hippie idealism to modern day government contractors, but they never try to move beyond the soft and the slapstick. What the film needed was an edge or a stylistic audacity that matched the wackiness of its story, but the filmmakers are too satisfied with their killer premise to be bothered with things like character or narrative inventiveness. It is a good premise, to be sure--good enough that it deserved a better movie.

Revolutionary Road (2009)

Last year’s Revolutionary Road, which garnered several Oscar nods despite getting a somewhat mixed reception, is based on a 1961 novel by the writer Richard Yates. It’s a book I’ve read and enjoyed, insomuch as anyone can enjoy a book about the “hopeless emptiness” of 1950s suburbia, but I read it so long ago that I was hoping to be able to take the film on its own terms. Unfortunately, like many movies based on beloved works of literature, Revolutionary Road is a film that exists very much in the shadow of its source material. On the outside, it’s a gorgeous looking, expertly acted piece of work, but unlike Yates, director Sam Mendes lacks the kind of incisive, incendiary storytelling skills to truly exploit the material for all its worth.

The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as Frank and April Wheeler, a married couple on the verge of their thirties. The two have always considered themselves exceptional-- immune to the soul-crushing monotony of meaningless jobs and a safe life in the suburbs. Yet as the film opens, Frank has found himself pushing paper at the same machine company his father once worked for, and the couple now have two kids and a simple, pleasant house on the street that gives the story its name. The disappointment of this existence has started to weigh on their marriage, and in a momentary flash of inspiration, the two hatch a wild plan to uproot their family and move to Paris, as they had dreamed of doing in their youth. This plan, which seems doomed from the start, briefly reinvigorates their relationship, but it brings along with it wholesale problems that force the two to question themselves and their ambitions.

As the content might suggest, Yates’ book is narratively audacious, heartbreaking, and distinctly American, and yet it’s these strengths that only help to highlight the problems with the film, which is rigorously classical and so stylistically unambitious that the only reaction it gets from the viewer is one of overwhelming ambivalence. Normally, this points to a number of problems, but in this case the blame can be placed squarely on the shoulders of the director. Mendes’ style here is relentlessly cold and detached, and for a story that is rooted in the American experience, oddly British. Many of the sequences are reminiscent of some kind of English chamber piece from the 40s or 50s--the scenes are well-composed and gloriously acted (especially by Winslet), but the style is stagey, stuffy, and too reliant on dialogue over action.

The thing is, you almost can’t blame Mendes for taking this approach. The book he's working from is full of small, wonderful moments, and he has a stellar cast and the hottest cinematographer in the business (Roger Deakins of No Country For Old Men fame) at his disposal, so it’s easy to see why he’d want to make the movie he did. The problem is that Yates' book has always fallen under the same “unfilmable” umbrella as novels like Catcher in the Rye or The Moviegoer for a reason. It’s a cerebral novel, almost experimental in the way it mines the contents of different characters’ psyches in order to build a story out of a scattered collection of events. Mendes has the unenviable task of trying to construct a film out of a book that is largely made up of characters’ thoughts and internal monologues, and outside of using constant narration (which, thankfully, he doesn’t) there’s not a lot to work with. You’ve got to give him points for trying, but the results don’t work, because when it all comes down, all the great moments in the novel of Revolutionary Road spring from the pseudo-omniscient asides by Yates, the embittered, eternal cynic, and not from the dialogue of his characters, whom he goes out of his way to portray as petty, feeble, and misguided. Mendes has to rely entirely on the outward actions of Frank and April to tell his story, and the results are naturally much more sympathetic to their foibles.

This would almost be excusable, but the real sin Mendes commits here is in not using his camera to create some--any-- kind of stylistic dissonance between what is being said by the characters and the real dramatic truth of the story. He’s much too content to film the couple’s domestic squabbles and heartbreaks from a safely removed distance, and this somehow becomes as exhausting as it is dull. Mendes has a background in the theatre, and he clearly loves actors (especially in this case since he’s married to Winslet), but he focuses on performance over action, movement, and meaning to a fault, and ends up turning what was a sad, ironic kind of satire into something more closely resembling Greek tragedy. Maybe it was the only choice he had when working from such an “unfilmable” novel, or maybe he’s just incompetent. Either way, as much as I hate to use the cliche, the results pale in comparison to the source material.

Zombieland (2009)

Right from the opening credits, Zombieland lets it be known that it doesn’t aspire to be anything more than a fun, uncomplicated ride. Instead of a quick montage establishing how the world came to be overrun with zombies, or menacing shots of the undead walking the streets, the film starts with a series of ultra-slow motion shots of people frantically running from hordes of flesh-eating cannibals. One guy desperately tries to carry a kid while being chased by an army of the things. Another is only steps ahead of a naked zombie stripper. In my personal favorite, a guy wearing a tuxedo straight out of Fantasy Island shoots an AK-47 right at the camera as a group of the walking dead converge on him from all angles. Oh yeah, and this all set to “For Whom the Bell Tolls” by Metallica.

If that doesn’t make it obvious enough, this is a film that desperately doesn’t want to be taken seriously, and I’m happy to say that it succeeds admirably in this regard (just take a look at the several cut scenes featuring the “zombie kill of the week”). Lots of movies have advertised themselves as being exactly what Zombieland is, only to weigh down the fun of their premise with absurd melodrama, halfhearted social commentary, and insulting attempts to “push the genre further” (see the Dawn of the Dead remake). Thankfully, the filmmakers behind Zombieland, specifically director Ruben Fleischer, know that’s not why anyone goes to see a zombie film when it’s not directed by George A. Romero. With this in mind, they never sell out on the built-in hook of their premise--in short, that zombies are as scary as they are inherently goofy, and that it's damn good fun to watch Woody Harrelson (who's having the time of his life here) take to them wielding a banjo as a weapon. Fill that out with some sharp one-liners, some interesting stylistic choices, a killer soundtrack, the always hot Emma Stone, and one of the most wonderfully ridiculous cameos in recent memory, and you’ve got what everyone wants from this genre-- a solid, unabashed B-movie.

Naturally, this is not to say that there aren’t faults here. Some aspects of the aesthetic Fleischer employs don’t quite work, like the rules for staying alive that the main character Columbus (played by Jesse Eisenberg with that endearing awkwardness that seems to be the trademark of his generation of actors) follows unerringly throughout the film, and which are flashed on screen each time they come into play. It’s a fun idea, but the rules aren’t half as creative as they should be, and by the fifth time the one about always shooting a zombie twice makes an appearance, it’s a bit more than stale. It’s these aspects of the film that get most frustrating, and this is only because Zombieland’s premise is so wide-open (thankfully, the cause behind the zombie apocalypse is left unexplained) that there are infinite avenues the story could have gone down at any particular turn, and not every one of them is guaranteed to satisfy every viewer.

But in saying this, I’ve already started overthinking this movie, which is as much a carnival ride as it is a film (it’s no surprise the main characters are on their way to a theme park). This film is certainly not making any headway in raising the genre back to the artful level of something like Night of the Living Dead, but that’s clearly not something Zombieland even pretends to be interested in. This is a movie that happily eschews all logic and faux-complexity in favor of showing Woody skid a car around a corner while gunning down zombies with an Uzi, and it’s all the better for it.