Six whole years have passed since the events of the first film - mainly because they can no longer sell Abigail Breslin as a preteen, so time must have passed - and the gang is still dorking their way through a zombie apocalypse. But it's not like this was the most functional group to begin with.
This film has many of the good qualities of the first film, sans the originality of it, of course. It's still very much tongue in cheek take on a zombie film and quite honestly more focused on the hijinks of its main cast rather than the living dead. They're there mostly for background noise. But it works and many of the jokes are quite good. As are the action scenes.
My main problem with the film can be distilled to what I would like to call sequelitis. In this instance, six years have supposedly passed, but aside from Little Rock (Breslin) suddenly being a young woman, this could have taken place two months after the original film. But because it has to be six years, it feels like the characters have been frozen in time. Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) and Wichita (Emma Stone) still feel like a couple that just got together, while Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) still feels like he hasn't quite decided whether or not he wants to be a part of this group.
It would have been so nice for this film to actually cut to six years later and honestly explore just what has changed. Now nothing has and the gang goes through the exact same problems as in the original film. Which feels cheap.
Still, it's by far not the worst sequel I've seen and when it works, it's a perfectly serviceable action comedy.
This film has many of the good qualities of the first film, sans the originality of it, of course. It's still very much tongue in cheek take on a zombie film and quite honestly more focused on the hijinks of its main cast rather than the living dead. They're there mostly for background noise. But it works and many of the jokes are quite good. As are the action scenes.
My main problem with the film can be distilled to what I would like to call sequelitis. In this instance, six years have supposedly passed, but aside from Little Rock (Breslin) suddenly being a young woman, this could have taken place two months after the original film. But because it has to be six years, it feels like the characters have been frozen in time. Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) and Wichita (Emma Stone) still feel like a couple that just got together, while Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) still feels like he hasn't quite decided whether or not he wants to be a part of this group.
It would have been so nice for this film to actually cut to six years later and honestly explore just what has changed. Now nothing has and the gang goes through the exact same problems as in the original film. Which feels cheap.
Still, it's by far not the worst sequel I've seen and when it works, it's a perfectly serviceable action comedy.