| Worth seeing: | as a highly entertaining piece of nonsense that doesn't add as much to the zombie genre as its predecessor |
| Director: | Ruben Fleischer |
| Featuring: | Avan Jogia, Emma Stone, Jesse Eisenberg, Luke Wilson, Thomas Middleditch, Woody Harrelson, Abigail Breslin, Bill Murray, Rosario Dawson, Zoey Deutch |
| Length: | 99 minutes |
| Certificate: | 15 |
| Country: | US |
| Released: | 18th October 2019 |
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
It’s ten years since the events of Zombieland, when the unlikely team of Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), Talahassee (Woody Harrelson) and sisters Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin) fought for survival together against an onslaught of undead flesh-eaters.
They’ve now found safety in the long-abandoned White House, but the sisters are getting itchy feet – Columbus has surprised Wichita with an unwelcome marriage proposal while Little Rock wants to get out into the world to find a man of her own.
Waking up one day to find the girls have left them, the boys have to reassess their lives. When Wichita returns alone, after Little Rock split on her, Columbus and Talahassee join her on a mission to find her sister and ensure that she’s safe.
On the road-trip that follows, they encounter a range of oddball human survivors and hoards of zombies, who’ve become more effective hunters over the past decade.
WHAT’S IT LIKE?
Ten years ago, when Ruben Fleischer first took us to Zombieland, the undead were already a little ubiquitous on our screens, but he still managed to add something fresh and deliver a comedy horror that felt surprisingly original.
With the likes of TV’s The Walking Dead now in its tenth season, it’s harder than ever to come up with something new and Double Tap doesn’t have the same novelty value of its predecessor.
Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg bounce off each other nicely, with a handful of eccentric supporting turns from the likes of Luke Wilson and Thomas Middleditch as another pair of survivors with an air of familiarity about them.
There are some clever visual gags and a handful of knowing nods to cultural references from Elvis to Terminator – some a little more blunt than others.
But while the action, dialogue and performances are generally a lot of fun, the story it’s all pegged to lacks coherence – from details such as a character who’s blown up his car apparently just conjuring up another out of nowhere in the very next scene, to the wider idea of what’s been happening in the past ten years.
From a gag even before the film has begun in earnest and a credits sequence with some of the funniest moments in the film, Double Tap will have you laughing out aloud enough to earn a place as one of the most entertaining comedies of the year – but few of the gags could be described as clever film-making.
It’s a string of winning moments, pinned to a disappointingly lazy underlying story – ironically, perhaps, for a zombie film, it’s all flesh and no bones.