The dead don’t die
Jim pickings…
Jim Jarmusch resurrects the zombie comedy.
CERTIFICATE 15 DIRECTOR Jim Jarmusch STARRING Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Chloë Sevigny, Tilda Swinton, Tom Waits, Steve Buscemi SCREENPLAY Jim Jarmusch DISTRIBUTOR Universal RUNNING time 105 mins
The Cannes Film Festival has a dubious track record with starry opening films, as anyone who caught 2014 stinker Grace Of Monaco can attest. This year’s event offered a more satisfying opening in The Dead Don’t Die, an all-star zom-com from hipster auteur Jim Jarmusch. Shame it doesn’t deliver the full buffet of brains you’re hoping for.
Despite a bedrock of respectful fondness for George A. Romero’s zombie classics, and a cast of indie darlings, TDDD is every bit as unhurried and arch as anything in Jarmusch’s oeuvre, for good and bad. Bill Murray, Adam Driver and Chloë Sevigny play cops in the town of Centerville, population 738. Through news reports, we learn that polar fracking has knocked the Earth off its axis, causing chaos to the natural order of things. The sun sets at odd hours, technology ceases to function and - oh yeah the dead burst out of the ground.
Unsurprisingly for a Jarmusch zombie film, TDDD takes a long time to deliver even a single reanimated corpse. In the opening 30 minutes we’re introduced to a colourful ensemble and eased into the sleepy rhythm of life in middle-of-no-whereville, America. With Jarmusch in his element, there’s charm to the off-kilter conversations going on around town, most of which have no relevance to the incoming zom-pocalypse.
When the dead rise, Jarmusch can’t resist the de rigueur sights of spilled entrails and doors barricaded with two-by-fours. Rather than an onslaught of undead, however, the generally unthreatening nature of the shambling (not running) corpses means most of TDDD unfolds with a consistent supply of wry exchanges that, though uniformly chucklesome, are never gut-bustingly funny. Meanwhile, a streak of meta-humour pushes it into slightly too-pleased-with-itself territory by the third act.
Latte of the dead
Attempts at satirical social commentary fare little better. Jibes at Trump’s America (Steve Buscemi’s “asshole” farmer wears a red “Make America White Again” baseball cap) feel underdeveloped. Meanwhile, the idea (expounded by Tom Waits’ all-seeing Hermit Bob) that the zombies are driven by their mortal materialistic desires, wandering the earth groaning “coff-ee” while eviscerating workers at a diner, or “wi-fi” while clinging to mobile phones, is an idea at least as old as Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead.
By adding nothing new to the debate, it feels like Jarmusch is 40 years late to the party.
There are silver linings. Murray and Driver make a watchable deadpan double act, the latter taking to zombie slaying with worrying ease. But Tilda Swinton is the scene-stealer as Scottish samurai/mortician Zelda, a typically surreal creation who calls people by their full name and dispatches the undead with a slice of her sword. But too many other characters get lost in the ensemble, notably Selena Gomez as a big city hipster and three teens in juvie whose subplot fizzles.
It’s a film that looks like it must have been a riot to make, but isn’t quite as fun to watch – and there isn’t a fright to be found. Post-Shaun
Of The Dead and even Zombieland, it can’t compete with the best recent undead movies. Ultimately, it’s a zombie film lacking bite.
THE VERDICT
A tasty cast animate Jim Jarmusch’s socio-political horror-com for an eccentric, if inessential, addition to the zombie movie canon.