When this ‘save us from the apocalypse’ flick starts, our hero, Brad Pitt is caught up in the mother of all traffic jams in downtown Philadelphia with his family. Soon, we get the picture things are not normal and a plague of zombies descends upon all soon after.
Thereafter the story follows familiar ground of the former action hero who is reluctantly cajoled and then forced back into service to single handedly save the world and, of course, his family. As is the want of the modern global film industry, Bond like, we then get a Thos. Cook tour of various world locales including South Korea (allegedly), Jerusalem, Cardiff (again allegedly) and Nova Scotia. Even the Soviet satellite of Belarus gets a gig through its national airline that escapes the carnage in Israel.
While Pitt dominates throughout, the film is otherwise strangely composed with any number of substantive supporting acts but none that you would describe as a co-star or leading lady. The most bizarrely interposed character is the son of a middle-eastern family who joins in the Pitt clan after his elders failed to heed pithy words of wisdom from the great man. Just what he was doing in and amongst the otherwise picture perfect nuclear family world is anyone’s guess.
And , while as I say Pitt dominates screen time, he does so at not more than third gear and the best acting of the whole film comes near the end when Pitt is comes face to face with a zombie on the tooth and it is the zombie that wins the performance plaudits hands down over our Bradley.
Having said that, the special effects are good fun, (a good plane crash and zombies piling on top of each other like ants in a feeding frenzy against the wall in Jerusalem – see image – are highlights) though seeing it in 3D is by no means mandatory, and the action races along. Which is a good thing seeing the gaps in logic that get exposed from time to time are ones that the audience is best not allowed to dwell on. Not that the target market for this holiday floss is PhD scholars.
Kryztoff Rating 3.5K
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