How 'Zombieland Double Tap' Ruined Something We Once Enjoyed

Zombieland was a breath of fresh, horrror comedy air in 2009. In the zombie and horror comedy genre its irreverence and incredible cast were what we needed at that moment. Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin and Bill Murray made for a terrifically funny group, especially Murray’s subversive, 4th wall breaking cameo as himself. The clever script created just enough frights to make Zombieland both funny and scary.

How did they screw up the sequel so badly? It boggles the mind, Zombieland Double Tap, the second attempt at making Zombieland a franchise after a failed TV pilot, is awful. Lazy, sloppy, and irksome in tone and stakes. Zombieland Double Tap is an unbearably smug and self satisfied sequel. The cast is still talented but the scenario given to this remarkable group has completely let them down and they don’t appear to care.

Zombieland Double Tap brings us back into the world of Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), Wichita (Emma Stone), Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin) as they are finding a new place to live. In classically lazy screenwriting, the group chooses one of the few places in the United States that would make for a good visual gag and some lazy reference humor, The White House.

Barricading themselves inside the White House our heroes settle into uncomfortable domesticity. Tallahassee has taken on the role of over-protective father to Little Rock who is eager to strike out on her own and prove that she’s a grown-up.. As for Columbus and Wichita, their romance has grown stale and Columbus’s idea for livening things up is to ask her to marry him.

The proposal goes poorly and the following morning, Wichita and Little Rock have stolen Tallahassee’s modified killing machine, the Presidential limousine,renamed ‘The Beast,’ and have hit the road. Distraught, Columbus mopes around for a while before he and Tallahassee decide to go shopping at a D.C shopping mall gone to seed. Here, they encounter Madison (Zoey Deutch), who claims she’s been hiding in a freezer at Pinkberry for an unspecified amount of time.

That’s pretty much it for my interest and care for Zombieland Double Tap. The introduction of the character of Madison pretty much had me checked out entirely. Deutch’s Madison is among the most regressive caricatures we’ve seen on screen in some time. Madison is bubbly, blonde and portrayed as lacking intelligence. She’s a walking dumb blonde joke at a time where such jokes have long fallen out of favor.

I know I am not supposed to care about logic or story progression but I was annoyed the moment this character existed. The logical inconsistency of this character are many. We don't know exactly how much time has passed since the first Zombieland, which was set a little while after zombies first rose from the ground. We're now to believe that this entire time, somewhere between 6 to 8 years, given how much Little Rock has grown up from the first movie, that Madison was hiding at the mall this whole time.

A character portrayed as barely smart enough to continue breathing has survived a zombie apocalypse. She's managed to not get eaten by zombies that we are told via voice over have evolved into ever more efficient killing machines. Madison has survived on her own and getting by only on Pinkberry. Oh, and she still has a model-esque physique despite half a decade or so of Pinkberry.

Again, I know, I am not supposed to care about this stuff but the rest of Zombieland Double Tap isn't good enough to keep me from spending my intellectual capital on logical inconsistencies. I was further disappointed when the movie failed to subvert the stereotype of Madison. I expected the movie would explain, perhaps, that she was some sort of zombie killing savant. That might, at the bare minimum, create for the character a way to exist believably in this universe.

Nope! She's just a walking blonde joke, years after such jokes should have been left in the comedy trope trash bin.

Even if blonde jokes still had a place in our culture in this day and age, the character of Madison is such a lazy cliche that she’d still be regressive and offensive. Nothing against Zoey Deutch who has been quite good in other roles, but she is awful in this movie. Deutch is desperately mistreated by a supremely lazy script which invents no arc for her character.

Therein lies yet another fault of Zombieland Double Tap, the movie doesn’t set a believable level where we can buy in on the survival of any of these characters. The movie opens with a voice over that re-introduces this post-apocalyptic universe and tells us how things have changed in however many years it's been since the first movie. We now have new zombies that have evolved and become more dangerous. We have ninja zombies that can open doors and sneak up on you.

We also have an even more dangerous group of zombies that get nicknamed Terminators because they are much, much harder to kill. They are quick and don’t go down from a simple double tap, the two shots to the head it used to take to guarantee a zombie was down and out. These Terminator zombies create a problem for the narrative as they are so powerful and dangerous that it is impossible to buy in to the idea that even our well-honed zombie killing heroes could survive them.

The only way they do survive, in a truly awful final act, is a Deus Ex Machina involving a character played by Rosario Dawson. Fans of The Walking Dead, your Glenn hiding under a dumpster escape is topped here with four characters surviving an impossible to survive zombie scenario. That plus the setting, a hippie commune where guns are not alone and are indeed melted down if someone brings one to the compound, make Zombieland Double Tap irksome, illogical, a movie you endure rather than enjoy.

The hippie commune scene is yet another lazy trope shoved in where it doesn't belong. We're asked to believe that in a universe where zombies are evolving toward being completely unstoppable, that a group of people with no weapons, built a commune where they don't allow guns. Again, I know, I am not supposed to use my brain here, but this is unforgivably illogical.

Not only that however, the jokes are just lazy. These characters exist as a punchline that is almost right wing in its level of caricature. It would be one thing if these hippie characters were portrayed as people who were once zombie killers who built themselves a community and learned to peacefully and safely coexist with zombies, but no, the movie just dunks on how dumb they are for not arming and defending themselves.

The makers of Zombieland Double Tap created this compound as a one note joke on how dumb hippies are for... being hippies, I guess? This isn't exactly high level satire. Worse yet, it's an easy fix. Explain in some exposition how they survived this long, why they gave up guns and have them be a catalyst for Woody Harrelson's regressive redneck character to learn about tolerance. He doesn't have to change his worldview but he could learn to respect other people and see that there is a strange sort of hope in the world.

Nope, hippies are dumb. That's the joke.

A cast this talented deserved better than a hack script that portrays characters we enjoyed in Zombieland as smug, self-satisfied and arrogant. Complacency should be the narrative of Zombieland Double Tap. A far better story than regressive blonde jokes and lazy dunking on hippies and pacifists, would be for these characters to find themselves so comfortable as zombie killers that they get complacent, lose their edge and come very close to death and they are forced to rethink the way they see the world.

That idea would play well off of the themes of Zombieland. Zombieland had our characters still learning the rules of this terrifying new reality. They had to learn how to survive, they had to learn how to trust each other and build toward becoming a group or a family. The narrative energy was strong, we were on board for arcs that had life and humor and purpose.

Those elements combined with Jesse Eisenberg and Emma Stone's romance plot, gave us a lot to root for and care about in Zombieland. Zombieland Double Tap does nothing to capitalize on those elements. No new arcs are created. Any arc that appears to develop, such as Little Rock's desire to grow up and strike out on her own, are handled indelicately and lead only toward lazy, hacky set-pieces such as the hippie commune.

One attempt to create an arc or purpose for Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisnberg introduces characters played by Luke Wilson and Thomas Middleditch. The idea is that these two new characters are exactly like Harrelson and Eisenberg. And that's the joke. The payoff is that Wilson and Middleditch get turned and we get an extended fight scene and a what if scenario of what might happen if Tallahassee and Columbus had to fight themselves. It's not even that great of a fight. It takes forever and reveals nothing about the characters.

Columbus and Tallahassee don't learn anything or grow from having to fight and kill what approximates to zombie versions of themselves. Director Ruben Fleischer even appears far more interested in destroying the Elvis themed Tennessee hotel set than he is in using these characters to reveal something new or interesting about our main characters.

Zombieland Double Tap has no narrative energy. The impetus for Zombieland Double Tap is to give us a familiar intellectual property that can be strip mined for a quick buck. No care is given to creating new arcs for these characters we cared about. In place of arcs we get lazy, one note caricatures and the characters we love have devolved and become less interesting, less sympathetic and less charming.

Rosario Dawson is also in Zombieland Double Tap but she's basically the Deus Ex Machina. She arrives at just the right moment to serve a narrative purpose. She's the cool chick inserted to give Tallahassee a somewhat age appropriate love interest. I like Rosario Dawson but the character, like so many other aspects of Zombieland Double Tap, is one note and merely functional.

The final note of absolute bankruptcy of ideas in Zombieland Double Tap comes from Bill Murray. If you recall, Murray was the best part of a very good first movie. He played himself and was hilarious before being accidentally dispatched by our main characters. But, because Murray was a huge hit with fans, they backed up a truckload of money to Murray's home and found a way to shoehorn him into Zombieland Double Tap.

Once again, something we enjoyed from the first Zombieland is reheated and served to us as leftovers from the refrigerator that have begun to turn. The movie ends with a pointless flashback to how the zombie apocalypse began during a promotional junket for Murray's Garfield movie. You know, because Garfield.

When even the presence of comic genius Bill Murray can't rescue the movie, you know it must rot something fierce. Zombieland Double Tap is awful from beginning to end. The characters we once loved are now unbearable and the irreverent zombie comedy has curdled into lazy caricature, slapped together to capitalize on the familiar and formerly beloved intellectual property that was Zombieland.