‘Zombieland: Double Tap’ a reunion that works
When Arrested Development came to Netflix for a fourth season after being canceled by FOX, the new series felt like a husk of its former self. It was clear that the magic had gone, that the time had passed and it was too difficult to juggle the schedules of the now-legendary cast and adjust for the time jump. Thankfully, Zombieland: Double Tap proves that every now and then, you can go back to the well and emerge with something that is just about as fun and entertaining as the original recipe.
Zombieland came out in 2009 and was celebrated as a sort of American Shaun of the Dead for its combination of zombies and comedy. Back then, The Walking Dead hadn’t even premiered yet, let alone started to decline in quality, and Zombieland played with zombie movie tropes in a way that would continue later with films like Warm Bodies.
It’s hard to think about 2009 as a long time ago when it’s only been 10 years, but the world and the entertainment landscape were so different back then—not to mention the careers of the cast of this film. Little Miss Sunshine herself Abigail Breslin was mostly known as a child star. Woody Harrelson had yet to appear in the stellar first season of True Detective and score an Oscar nomination for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Emma Stone was more known for rom-coms than for Oscar films like Birdman and La La Land, which earned her a Best Actress win in 2017. Jesse Eisenberg had yet to take on his career-defining role as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network. Fast forward 10 years later and it’s hard to imagine that all these big stars would come back for another round in a snarky meta zombie comedy, but thankfully, everyone was onboard and ready to return to z-land.
This entry sees Columbus (Eisenberg), Tallahassee (Harrelson), Wichita (Stone) and Little Rock (Breslin) living in the White House and settling into a boring domestic life of occasionally slaughtering zombies, but mostly dealing with relationships and the boredom of being able to do whatever you want without any consequences. When Columbus wants to take his relationship with Wichita to the next level by getting married—after proposing with the Hope Diamond, no less—she starts to feel trapped by their routine. At the same time, Little Rock is no longer a little kid and wants to spend time with people her age and socialize, something that isn’t exactly easy when you’re one of the only people left alive after the zombie apocalypse. So both the ladies split, Little Rock to forge a new path with a hippie from Berkeley (Avan Jogia) and Wichita to find her runaway sister. Soon after, the guys take off to find them and a road trip through the deserted world ensues with stops at an abandoned mall, an Elvis-themed tourist attraction outside Graceland and even a rooftop commune.
Of course, there are a few new faces along the way including badass Nevada (Rosario Dawson) and doppelgängers Flagstaff (Thomas Middleditch) and Albuquerque (Luke Wilson) as well as ditsy Madison (Zoey Deutch), who rocks a Juicy Couture tracksuit and has survived by living in a freezer. Appearances from Middleditch and Wilson are particularly fun, with Middleditch giving such a close copy of Eisenberg’s clipped tone and awkward mannerisms that it’s almost eerie. Deutch steals several scenes by being exactly that kind of girl everyone knows who would somehow luck her way through extreme danger despite not having a brain cell in her head. She’s a cliche, but not in a way that feels exhausted and one-note.
While it might not be as creative as the original, Zombieland: Double Tap still manages to capture that snarky tone that makes for entertaining zombie fun. The meta moments are even more meta, the Zombie Kill of the Week, which stems from the TV series pitch, becomes the Zombie Kill of the Year and we even categorize the zombies into distinct types: The Homer, The Ninja, The T-800, etc. It correctly banks on the audience’s deep knowledge, and perhaps waning enthusiasm, for zombie pop culture in a way that keeps it fun and fresh, an impressive feat for a sequel made this far down the road from the original.
