Studio: Columbia Pictures
Director: Ruben Fleischer
Writer: Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, Dave Callaham
Producer: Gavin Polone
Stars: Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin, Rosario Dawson, Zoey Deutch, Luke Wilson, Avan Jogia, Thomas Middleditch
Review Score:
Summary:
Columbus, Tallahassee, and Wichita encounter eccentric new survivors when they venture back into the wasteland to track down Little Rock and her new boyfriend.
Review:
I’m writing this piece during awards season, when there is currently hot tea brewing in the music biopic community. The snub getting some supporters heated makes mention of Rami Malek questionably cleaning up on statues for lip-synching through a functional portrayal of Queen frontman Freddy Mercury in “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Optional digs further mar that movie with accusations of mediocrity as well as reminders that its director walks under a dark cloud of serious sexual abuse allegations.
Meanwhile, these same people contend, Taron Egerton actually sung his soul out as Elton John in “Rocketman” and the Motion Picture Academy didn’t even acknowledge his performance with an Oscar nomination. Additional arguments assert “Rocketman” is the more emotionally affecting, better produced, and certainly better acted film between the two. So how could “Bohemian Rhapsody” earn so much more attention?
Those exhausted by the comparisons wish to reframe the metrics. “Why does everyone keep bringing up another film,” ask people who are willfully oblivious to the obvious answer. They want to follow the code of judging a movie on its own merits.
That can be a noble intention. Generally speaking though, it’s silly to pretend people don’t commonly talk about movies in terms of other movies. Experiences with films are shared vocabulary terms we use to communicate with fellow cinephiles and establish baseline understandings. “I think that one’s the best/worst film in the series.” “If you enjoyed A, then you’ll definitely appreciate B.” And “it’s like X meets Y” is an everyday elevator pitch all over Hollywood.
Avoiding the practice of weighing one movie against another doesn’t realistically apply to sequels either. Besides, it’d be difficult to do in a case like “Zombieland,” which earned popular parking spots in many memories as a great go-to for exemplary zom-com entertainment. The problem with becoming so beloved is that everything following after, including its own sequel, has a higher hill to climb. Perhaps this fact unfairly lengthens the measuring stick. That still leaves “Double Tap” stuck in a shadow that a less toothy script can’t convincingly joke its way out of.
Maybe I’d find the movie more amusing in a vacuum. But it’s hard not to notice C+ comedy sitting in the seat where A+ effort once was. “Zombieland: Double Tap” just doesn’t work as well as its predecessor because it doesn’t follow the rules that let the first film’s funniness flow fluidly.
Adding a healthy dollop of meta humor marks the first recipe change. “Double Tap” opens with the Columbia Pictures torchbearer smacking down two zombies during logo bumpers. Voicing his character Columbus, Jesse Eisenberg then thanks the audience for coming back like a Southwest flight attendant giving a perfunctory pre-flight speech. “You have a lot of choices when it comes to zombie entertainment and we appreciate you picking us.” “Double Tap’s” fourth wall bending gets better by the time it takes potshots at the conceptual absurdity of Uber. For now, we’re starting off on a foot with a wobbly ankle.
It’s been 10 years between movies, yet only six have passed inside Zombieland, denoted by Abigail Breslin’s Little Rock celebrating her 18th birthday when she was just 12 last time. Emma Stone graduates to get the “and” credit on this go while Breslin now leads the lengthened list of supporting players. Breslin has a reduced role since the setup concerns Eisenberg, Stone, and Woody Harrelson going back on the road to track down her and a new beau. Still, Breslin might want to yell at her agent after getting her name card bumped to a post-title position. Imagine the Fab Four being billed as “John, Paul, and George are The Beatles, plus Ringo too!”
Downgrades are kind of “Double Tap’s” thing. We went from an exchange with Columbus having Tallahassee deliver the snappy “Zombieland” punchline, “do you wanna see how hard I can punch” to Tallahassee crassly saying, “I don’t give a f*ck what you’d like.” In place of Little Rock hilariously teaching Tallahassee about Hannah Montana, we now have Columbus and Wichita comparing different ways to mispronounce Portishead. Replacement gags have far less creative bite than before. What’s worse, “Double Tap” leans heavily on our affinity for these actors and their characters to add gas, and that goodwill only drives the film so far.
Remember, “Zombieland’s” humor scorched instead of sizzled because it cleverly drew off the inherent charisma of its core cast. Which makes it perplexing that “Double Tap” goes all in on disrupting their dynamic by splitting everyone up and wedging new people in between.
Casting Zoey Deutch as scatterbrained survivor Madison compounds the problem with that quizzical call. In the eyes of how audiences popularly perceive them, Harrelson, Eisenberg, and Stone appear to play exaggerated extensions of themselves, or at least the screen personas they’re often associated with. It’s part of why we like them. It doesn’t make sense to replace a primary player with someone who isn’t equally unique or as endeared as an actor.
Deutch plays a stereotypical blonde ditz copied from every other comedy that’s ever contained a blonde ditz. Madison consistently can’t remember Tallahassee’s name so she calls him things like ‘Salty Taffy.’ Rather than good guffaws she gives us groaners like, “This is the Oval Office! Why do they call it that?” Is this salted earth really the best place for “Double Tap” to dig for dialogue?
It’s not like the movie isn’t funny at all. It gets in a fair share of decent jabs. But fans of the first film can’t help but feel let down by so many of them hammering at the same nails. Recycled bits repeatedly call back to Madison being an airhead, Little Rock’s patchouli-scented boyfriend being a dippy hippie, and a commune member who can’t stop proposing group sex. “Double Tap” even mulches leftover “Zombieland” compost, such as when Tallahassee shouts, “thank God for rednecks” again.
Yeah, maybe “Zombieland: Double Tap” would come off better if it wasn’t following such a tough act. It connects enough dots to still be a suitable three-star movie, though it earns those mostly by following the first film’s structure: start with slow-motion slaughter set to Metallica, end on a crazy spectacle of mass mania, and fill the space in between with (in this case mildly) humorous road trip hijinks. It’s when “Double Tap” dares to dilute that formula with too much dumbing down that things get disappointingly dicey.
Review Score: 60
At least the movie only runs 70 minutes, though I suppose that extra 10 technically disqualifies it from being a literal amateur hour.