If the Dead Don’t Die’s true purpose was to actually turn the viewer into a zombie then I must congratulate it as a revolution in the zombie genre. If not, then it is the long-lost holy grail of how not to make a film.
Bill Murray and Adam Driver star as cop partners in a sleepy town of disconnected people. After the earth changes rotation, strange things start occurring and it does indeed look like zombies are coming. Lovely. Now it’s all up to the townsfolk to fend for themselves against this undead flesh-eating horde. But how can this film earn a solid identity as a horror comedy when films like Shaun of The Dead have perfectly summed up the genre before? Well, it doesn’t, even with such a phenomenal cast.
The film’s attempts at comedy are awkward and sometimes even seem unintentional with the three-week-bread-stale acting. Bill Murray looks like he doesn’t want to be there and Adam doesn’t look like he knows what he’s doing. Even Tom Waits has a forgettable role as a socially-removed woods-dweller who adds next to nothing, making it painful to see such a cast go to waste. Tilda Swinton also stars in a role that can only be considered embarrassing and like something out of a 2000s CBBC film and is so indescribably out of place I won’t waste time trying to convey my thoughts on it.
As you might tell, the script is what makes this film an abysmally dull ride, as you wouldn’t find Murray this awful in any other film. I sometimes couldn’t even tell if it was attempted humour or just the agonisingly forced acting, with one scene, for example, involving Murray entering a diner and spotting two eaten corpses and returns out to say he didn’t want to see that. Then the other two cops terribly re-enact the same scene to the point where it seems to think it’s funny but just made a little part of me die instead to where I could feel an internal zombie groan. The film even has the audacity to try and excuse this dreary and suicidally uninteresting acting as intentional, with Peterson claiming he ‘read the script’ while they’re trapped in their car by zombies near the film’s climax. A cheap fourth-wall break joke that had my face in my hands at its attempt to justify itself, let alone actually being aware of how thunderously stale the acting was.
On the narrative side, we hardly get any zombie scenes until what feels like eleven hours in. I’m not one to complain about a slow build-up but the so called ‘characterisation’ is so unbelievably dreary and unnaturally stiff we don’t get at all attached to any of the overabundant characters. It’s not that they don’t get enough screen-time, it’s that their awkwardly-delivered passive dialogue stretches on too long. We don’t learn how they feel about each-other or their personal values to get some sort of connection, all we get is some ‘oh no this is weird’ useless anticipation of the zombies.
For example, we’re introduced to this racist farmer in a diner who claims his coffee is ‘way too black for me’ while a black man is trying to make conversation. This is great potential for characterisation and some narrative tension. Alas, he does bugger all the rest of the film except be confused at what’s going on with the zombies.
We get this awkward nerd who runs a zombie comic shop who’s only trait is he’s awkward and knows cliché stuff about zombies. We get a guy looking for his cats who does nothing more than look for his cats. But the epitome of the film’s useless characters would be these detention centre teens who act like they’ve been rejected by X-Men’s Young Mutants because their only psychic power is having global warming contemplation and useless anticipation of a zombie apocalypse in place of actual character. Who knows? Maybe they’re the masterminds behind the townspeople acting like they’ve had some sort of joint lobotomy.
This is another major flaw with the film’s execution: how needlessly focused it is on the outbreak’s context and build-up when it’s not at all what we care about. We want to see the zombies’ effect, however humorous or serious it may be, on the sleepy town, not a half hour lecture on polar fracking and the earth’s rotational orbit changing, as well as a fistful of meaningless paranormal anomalies like animals fleeing into woods and the song Dead Don’t Die repeating on the radio on and on to the point where you want to pull a shotgun to your face as if you’ve been infected. And when the zombies do arrive, it’s the driest, most cookie-cutter half hour massacre as a flesh-eater flick can be. An absolute time waste.
The film even has the audacity to leave out on a half-winged ‘we indulge in consumerism, so we technically are already zombies’ message, which is one that has pretty much been zombified in itself.
When pretty much all these paper-thin characters get eaten, we don’t feel anything. Not because we’ve seen this done in countless films before but because, again, none of them form any sort of emotional bond so they’re little more than meat. As a comparison to a film Dead Don’t Die desperately wants to be, Shaun of the Dead’s zombies were seen as an opportunity for our characters to better themselves and push out their long-hidden feelings for each-other and the film wasted no time with zombies if it didn’t provide a reflection in our focused characters. Here, absolute bollocks happens other than a predictable survival shootout. Characters either randomly die with nothing learned about them or connecting them with the others and the zombies aren’t even threatening due to the film painfully attempting to humorously characterise them.
And with that, there are still parts of the film completely dumbfounding. Why do Bill and Adam have a stereotypical sacrificial last-stand shootout against the ‘overwhelming’ zombies when there are obvious massive gaps they can walk through? Why does the film waste its time having its characters remark too many ‘weird’ things when we know what’s going to happen? Why does it insist on having zombies that try to play baseball and play phone games as part of their ‘past lives’ when it does nothing but embarrass you? Absolute nonsense and lazy writing.
The Dead Don’t Die is less of a zombie film and more of a zombie itself. You can practically hear it groaning and its flesh peeling through its forced, uncomfortable comedy attempts and getting-nowhere script. Few films have made me feel sorry for such a strong cast of actors such as this in this incomprehensible bore-fest. While it personifies a zombie very well, it’s hard to think of this one returning from the grave anytime soon. Because the Dead Don’t Die is roadkill.