More cross-pollination. What do you do if you have notionally undesirable product? You lie about it. Or, at least allow it to be misunderstood. Zombieland has romantic comedy plotting, with hodgepodge horror flourishes. It's two separate, gender baiting joybuzzes, clumsily aligned for mass-market appeal. It's a date movie! How was it sold? The dream was stricken survivors trapped in a terror world with a game show rule-base. Kill of the Week! bleated the trailers. Turns out there's no kill propaganda being beamed into the public's pliant mind, the gags swamping advert real estate are just Family Guy style digressions designed to add a bit of flavour to down-time. Oh well. Settle in for a laboured attempt to clone the wonderful tonal dynamics at play in Shaun of the Dead. Stir in an ever-present voice over that over-explains for dunces, and you end up with something closer to Scrubs' twee life-lessons than actual dispatches from the apocalypse. Zombieland is a toothless danger-world, full of characters that regularly elect to endanger themselves just to advance well trodden women-as-treasure machinations. Also, who the fuck uses a toilet cubicle in the wasteland?
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