Unrelenting Mediocrity

People are running through the streets, screeching like Donald Sutherland at the end of 1978's Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, attacking everybody they see or hear. Everybody who is bitten joins the seething hordes of mindless killers within seconds, turning on friends and family without hesitation or mercy. Survivors are in a frantic race for survival against nearly insurmountable odds. Society is breaking down. The future of the human race appears bleak, indeed.

No, I'm not talking about 28 Days Later, because that was a good movie. It had a strong script, a talented director, and a committed cast of actors who managed to sell the desperation of being thrust into such a hopeless situation. Unfortunately, I'm talking about World War Z, a film that is but isn't really based on the book of the same name, written by the fruit of Mel Brooks' loins, Maxwell Silver Hammer Brooks.

The novel is a collection of stories told by survivors of a global zombie outbreak that nearly wiped out the human race in the recent past. It's not really designed for the big blockbuster treatment, seemingly more suitable presented for television as a Ken Burns-type of faux documentary mini-series. That's what I always imagined it as, at any rate. Of course, that isn't what we got. No, we're left with a big, expensive, loud, stupid, bloodless action movie that kinda-sorta features zombies.

Brad Pitt plays Gerry, some dude who used to work for the government in some vague capacity that is never clarified. But whatever he did for Uncle Sam, you can rest assured that he was the best at it. Because people keep saying that. He quit his old job to be a stay-at-home dad because that's a lot more fulfilling than... whatever it is he used to do. He's driving around town with his boring, clinging wife (that boring lady cop from The Killing), and his two annoying, clinging kids (kids), when all hell breaks loose around them.

Brad Pitt: Cool as a cucumber in the face of Armageddon.

Jogging zombie dudes start chomping on people left and right, cops are shooting at everybody, things are just exploding in the distance, and a garbage truck starts smashing through traffic like crazy, leaving a convenient path in its wake for Gerry to drive through. He gets distracted by his shrieking, useless children and takes his eyes off the road for five minutes while driving way over the speed limit, and his car gets sideswiped by another speeding vehicle that totally had the right of way. Some other stuff happens, Gerry steals an RV and the family heads for New Jersey, because plot.

Gerry sits around in his bitchin' new ride, soothing his asthmatic daughter in a scene poorly torn from M. Night Shyamalan's Signs, then Gerry calls his friend Jerry at the U.N. and asks his pal if maybe he can send  a helicopter to pick his family up because they don't want to be eaten by a bunch of overeager extras in terrible makeup because they got too "method". Jerry tells Gerry to get to dah chopper on the roof of some apartment building at dawn.

Morning breaks, and Matthew Fox shows up to escort Gerry to Jerry's new pad on a military flotilla in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The Matthew Fox politely disappears because he remembered that the rest of scenes were cut from the movie months ago, leaving the audience forever changed by his chilling depiction of the brave character "Parajumper". Jerry tells Gerry that his family is doomed to live and toil in the maple syrup mines of Nova Scotia unless Gerry agrees to accompany some fetus in a sweater vest calling himself a scientist to South Korea in an effort to find this unconventional plague's "patient zero" and maybe even find some sort of cure for the damned thing.

Five seconds after the plane touches down at a military base in the Korean peninsula, the super genius science guy slips on the runway and blows his own brains out, because he just read the film's script and realized what a horrible mistake he made by agreeing to act in a movie called World War Z. All hope is lost!

But Gerry continues to travel the world, bringing death and destruction to every location he visits, eventually detonating a grenade in a crowded commercial plane, causing it to crash in Wales. He visits some friendly folks at a WHO laboratory and tells them he thinks he's figured out a way to camouflage people from the relentless zombie hordes. In his travels as a harbinger of the apocalypse, Gerry has noticed that the rampaging zombies occasionally bypass seemingly healthy people seemingly at random, as if they couldn't even see these people. He surmises that these folks are probably terminally ill, so he suggests that intentionally making people really, really sick will allow them to walk among the zombies undetected. Unfortunately, the lab where all the dangerous pathogens are kept is in a wing of the building overrun with the undead.

Undaunted, Gerry tapes some porno magazines to his arms and runs screaming into the mouth of madness with a one-handed Israeli commando and a bearded British scientist, who both turn around and run back to safety as soon as Gerry decides to step on every piece of broken glass he can find in his efforts to sneak past the zombies. Reaching the lab, he finds himself trapped inside as a zombie in a lab coat stands outside, leering at his pretty hair and chattering his teeth like an irate prairie dog.

Gerry sits around in the lab for a few days, stroking his beard and trying to figure out a way out of this mess, until he remembers why he ventured into this zombie lab in the first place. He closes his eyes and chooses a random syringe of potentially incurable disease and injects it into one of his beefy arms. One excruciating staring contest later, Gerry opens up the door and lets Zombie Doctor sniff him out, and the uppity physician decides that our hero is not fit to chew on, allowing him to pass down the hall unharmed.

Gerry stops to star in a quick Pepsi commercial before calling his pall Jerry to tell him that his plan of giving everybody AIDS could totally work, but Jerry has to break the bad news to his pal. You see, everybody over in the boring Battlestar Galactica refugee flotilla just assumed that Gerry was dead, so they shipped his family off to the unforgiving maple syrup mines, anyway. Realizing that his family has been condemned to a lifetime of misery and delicious pancakes, Gerry tries to commit suicide, but proves too boring to die, instead hoping that World War Z makes a shitload of money, allowing him the chance to rescue his family from the hellish confines of Nova Scotia in the sequel, World War Zzzz.

This movie is a pile of garbage. The PG-13 rating prevents the film from showing any graphic violence, which robs many of the action sequences of their power. Brad Pitt effortlessly slices through a woman's wrist with one swipe of his knife off-screen, like he's chopping through a salami roll. He gets his crowbar stuck in a zombie's skull and desperately tries to pull it out before he's overwhelmed by the zombie's irate friends, but the moment doesn't work because you can't see the crowbar stuck in the zombie skull, only Brad Pitt  halfheartedly pulling on something just out of the frame. Massive crowds of swarming zombies get blasted by heavy artillery, and they just explode in puffs of grey dust, like they're full of chocolate milk mix.

And considering he's not just the lead actor but also a producer of the film, Brad Pitt never tries to act like he gives a shit about being in World War Z. He just wanders through action sequence after action sequence with the same vapid expression on his face, looking like he's just waiting for the director to tell him he can go home for the evening.

Look at that expression. It just screams "meh".

I never felt like he cared about anything, which made it impossible for me to invest myself in the film. No other characters in the film matter, because there are no other characters in the film. There are just a bunch of actors standing around like placeholders, waiting for Brad Pitt to interact with them so they can cash their checks and go do more interesting things, like watching paint dry.

Director Marc Forster tries to lend the film a sense of immediacy with mostly handheld cinematography, but it just gets annoying when the camera wavers around like the camera operator is having trouble supporting its weight long enough for the boring actors to recite their insipid dialogue. It's distracting, and I would hate to see what this shaky-cam quick-cutting editing style looks like in 3D. It seems like it would be intolerable.

I've seen critics calling this movie amazing. One claimed this is a better "plague" movie than Contagion. One called it a scarier film than Alien. One doofus called it a gripping, edge-of-your-seat thrill ride. They said all of these things with straight faces, so either they're incredible poker players, or they're all fucking brain-damaged. World War Z is a heavy burlap sack of shit with a crude rendition of Brad Pitt's face scrawled on its side, being carried by an old woman with terrible upper body strength as she shuffles down a poorly-lit corridor filled with Pepsi vending machines and weeping orphans. It's less than nothing.

I can't tell you the novel was high art, but it was entertaining and it never insulted me with its very existence. It deserved better than this pathetic excuse for a movie.

Unrelated. I just needed something to cheer me up.

On that note, here's the latest installment of my irregular podcast series, Celluloid Cellar! This episode deals with the numerous differences between 1982's Conan The Barbarian starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and 2011's Conan The Barbarian starring Khal Drogo. It's just as embittered and pointless as the review you just skimmed out of boredom. Enjoy:

Celluloid Cellar: Conan The Barbarian



That's all I've got for now. Until next time...

TIME MARCHES ON!

I got nuthin'.