In 1985, a little well-known movie called Day of the Dead was written and directed by a fellow named George A. Romero. In 2008, they remade that classic zombie film. The day they released it, a bit of old George’s soul died.
The plot of Day of the Dead is basic in every sense of the word. A small Colorado town is placed on military lockdown due to a strange illness that seems to be affecting a good portion of the population. It turns out the illness is a virus that takes over the body and causes eventual "zombification." As I am sure you can predict there are a chosen few town residents who happen to be immune to infection. The movie is their attempt to escape alive.
What is wrong with his movie? Let me count the ways! Casting Nick Cannon as the wise cracking black guy is never, and I repeat NEVER, a good idea. I suppose he was a bit of a jokester with the clever one liners in Drumline (which I enjoyed), but I will consider that as the one exception. With lines like "Every time you see a black guy with a big sharp object, it HAS to be a spear???!?", and "That WAS kinda gangsta wasn’t it", I fully expected Nick Cannon to shout out Flava Flav’s signature catch line "Yeeeeeaaaaahhhhhh Boooiiiiiiiii!!"at any moment. Mr. Cannon annoyed me so much in this film that I secretly wished he would have either turned into a zombie or been eaten by one. "Now dat’s wat I’m talkin’ bout!" Sad.
Mena Suvari, who played the lead role of Sarah Bowman was for me the only light in this movie. Too bad the dimmer switch was turned way down. This thing was just ridiculous in every sense of the word. We saw nothing new here at all. The zombies were played out and we have seen it all before. The only difference in these zombies compared to those in other films was the fact that these could climb walls, leap into the air as high as they so choose, and could jump from a three story building and hit the ground running!
One other major problem with this thing is the fact that they tease you with so many different things and then fail to deliver! Mena’s character early on mentions that although she carries a gun, it is never loaded. When a fellow soldier asks why, she claims it’s complicated. Not another word is ever mentioned about her unloaded gun! Why bring up a portion of a side story randomly if you plan never to explain it or elaborate? This phenomenon occurs more than once in this film! In one scene we see Mena and her hormonally raging brother arguing about some reason that she left town years earlier and vowed not to return. We hear a few sentences about some issue that they had with each other, but it is immediately dropped and never again discussed!
Overall the acting is basically a joke. There is a reason this went straight to DVD. Not many of the actors even stood a chance at holding their own here and Ving Rhames died off quite quickly. To quote a good friend of mine (http://www.passportcinema.com), this movie was a remake of 1985's Day of the Dead as much as my buttocks are a remake of The Wizard of Oz!
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
