27/10/19

It’s hard to believe that ten years have passed since the first Zombieland film – and, while the original came as a breath of fresh air amidst the unseemly scramble of leaden undead movies that hit the screens around that time, it’s probably fair to say that there weren’t too many punters desperate to see a sequel. But you have to take your hat off to director Ruben Fleischer, who not only persuaded somebody to finance this, but also got the four lead players to reprise their roles.

A decade has passed for the quartet of survivors too, who – when we first encounter them – are moving into their new headquarters: the White House. Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) and Witchita (Emma Stone) are now a couple, while Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) has taken on a fatherly role towards Little Rock (Abgail Breslin). But LR’s at a difficult age, starting to long for a little ‘me time’ and, when Columbus rashly proposes marriage to Wichita, she too feels a little hemmed in. So the two women hit the road, looking for new horizons.

Complications occur when LR encounters a wandering hippie (Avan Joggia) with a guitar and a repetoire of popular rock songs, which he claims to have written. She falls promptly under his spell and runs off with him to a hippie community where weapons are banned, dumping Wichita in the process. Wichita returns to the two men but, in her absence, Columbus has hooked up with Madison (Zoey Deutch), an airheaded valley girl, who has improbably managed to stay alive (and meticulously clean) in the midst of all the carnage. Despite the awkward situation, the four of them head out on LR’s trail.

Double Tap is undoubtedly fun – a silly, good-natured addition to what went before – but, like so many sequels, it struggles to add anything new to the mix. Here, there’s an attempt to suggest that the zombies are evolving from the simple shuffling ‘Homers’ of the original story to ‘T-800s,’ leaner, meaner and harder to kill – and there’s a loosely knit story arc about the importance of family – but, ultimately, that’s not really enough to justify this as a film in its own right. And some of the internal logic of the tale really doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

The laughs come easily enough and there are sly references to things that occurred in episode one. The cartoon violence is unashamedly visceral (unleash these levels of slaughter at human victims and that 15 rating might need to be raised a notch) and there’s an interesting new character in the shape of Rosario Dawson, as a woman with a major Elvis Presley fixation.

So yes, it’s no hardship to watch – but it isn’t destined to linger very long in the memory.

3.6 stars

Philip Caveney