Zombieland

***1/2 Stars

Zombieland is a kick-ass thrill ride. It only lasts 81 minutes, but I promise you'll get your money's worth. In fact, it might be the best zombie movie ever. And this is coming from someone who has never fully embraced the genre. I never really got the point. How much substance can you really do when your antagonist is a creature who runs around like their on fire trying to eat humans for sustenance? Well, luckily Zombieland embraces this formula and gets mostly everything right. Starring Woody Harrelson in top form, he plays Tallahassee, a survivor of a zombie epidemic that has nearly wiped out human civilization. He collides with a young man named Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) after meeting on an abandoned highway. Fitting comfortably in the Michael Cera role, Eisenberg wonderfully conveys an awkward energy that Harrelson eats right up.

The premise is simple enough. Zombies try to infect you, so you try to kill them before they do. The film begins with Columbus explaining the rules of how to survive in zombieland. There's a hilarious sequence with Eisenberg defending himself from a fat zombie by following one of the rules called "Good Cardio." While at a gas station, the zombie attacks him, so he runs around in circles until the zombie gets tired, giving him time to fire a shotgun round right into it.

When Tallahassee and Columbus entering a store for supplies, they meet up with two sisters named Wichita (Superbad's Emma Stone) and Little Rock (critical darling Abigail Breslin) surviving the epidemic just like them. Events collide that force the four to work together. Your looking at a perfectly cast movie here that delivers the zombie thrills and kills you're craving for.

The reason why Zombieland works is because it avoids everything that's wrong with those "serious" zombie movies. Whether George A. Romero wants to hear it or not, zombies are and always will be, funny. To me, they have never been a legitimate villain, but rather just a pond for comedic scenes. Zombieland never gets serious on a universal scale, not one line of dialogue discusses the idea of a cure, and it centers all of its attention on its four stars. Featuring one of the best cameos ever, Zombieland may lack in substance, but it makes up for it by ignoring substance all together.