Brain food

Smart horror comedy
Zombieland gets by on charm

QUE CERA: Jesse Eisenberg

by MARK SLUTSKY

Earlier this year, Jesse Eisenberg starred in Adventureland, a good-natured coming-of-age story about a smart, neurotic young man who stumbles through a romance with a more experienced girl and learns valuable life lessons from an older, seemingly cooler guy. This week, Eisenberg stars in Zombieland, a good-natured coming-of-age story about a smart, neurotic young man who stumbles through a romance with a more experienced girl and learns valuable life lessons from an older, seemingly cooler guy, only this time he also kills a few dozen zombies. I really have no idea how this happened; it’s like a production from a parallel universe where every movie is zombie-themed somehow slipped into our reality.

Eisenberg plays “Columbus” (everyone in the movie is identified by their hometown), a loner at the best of times who finds himself oddly thriving in an America overrun by flesh-eating zombies. Living by his wits, and a set of rules he’s devised to stay alive, he meets Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), a wild man type with a brash personality that couldn’t be farther from our squirmy hero. Meeting up with a couple of sisters (Abigail Breslin and Emma Stone), the substitute family decides to head west to a theme park that’s supposedly undead-free.

It must be said that Eisenberg, while a likeable enough performer, is really working a Michael Cera thing in Zombieland, and it’s enough to actually get distracting. (It’s particularly weird when he’s playing against Stone, who co-starred with Cera in Superbad.) That said, the small cast works together well and are believable as a wacky band of outsiders.

Zombieland is much more of a comedy than a horror film and, for the most part, it succeeds. One sequence in the movie really stands out, and though I won’t spoil it for you, it’s the best use of self-reflexive celebrity hilarity since Being John Malkovich, and it’s the movie’s centrepiece.

But hardcore zombiephiles might have a problem with Ruben Fleischer’s directing. He seems more comfortable with the laughs than with the action, and there are some stretches of the film that go on for too long without any brains-eating antics. Still, he does have a couple of visual tricks up his sleeve, and Zombieland gets by on humour and charm.

ZOMBIELAND
OPENS THIS FRIDAY, OCT. 2