Devotees of zombie flicks beware: World War Z is not of your genre. Rather, it’s a poorly disguised medical thriller with a doomsday backdrop, in which the undead serve as convenient, peripheral villains, disposable adversaries of a blandly heroic Brad Pitt.
Sporting a middle school beard and speaking in what is by now the actor’s default pseudo-drawl, Pitt’s Gerry Lane has been biding his time house-husbanding in a leafy Philadelphia hamlet after leaving his post as U.N. something-or-other. He is spending his days serving his wife and daughters breakfast and escorting them to work and school when a zombie apocalypse breaks out and, wouldn’t you know it, duty calls.
Chaos, conveyed by frenetic camerawork and choppy editing, reigns supreme in the world of World War Z. Non-sequiturial explosions abound – you can almost imagine director Marc Foster, whose previous films include subtler works like Finding Neverland and Stranger Than Fiction, being harassed by producers chanting Michael Bay’s name like a mantra.
The real star of Z is not Pitt, who’s little more than a lazy composite of Roland Emmerich good guys, but the movie’s action sequences. Too bad for us that most of them are either badly lit, epileptic, or both, with some handheld camera scenes so dark and shaky that they approach incoherence. At one point we find Gerry and family, who have escaped Philadelphia for Newark (go ahead and laugh), trying to catch a U.N. chopper on a high-rise rooftop. As they flee through the building’s corridors toward an improvised helipad, zombies in hot pursuit, you’re treated to an experience not far from spinning in circles through a strobe-lit room, though the latter is a lot more fun.
It’s never really clear what Gerry’s actual job is, aside from plot advancer. We know he worked for the U.N. and, like a cop pulled out of retirement for one last case, is called back into service. Just substitute a metropolitan police department with a massive international organization, a criminal mastermind with a bunch of poorly realized zombies, and a talented character actor with a mailing-it-in Brad Pitt. Initially the muscle for a wunderkind virologist who’s charged with finding the zombie outbreak’s source, Gerry must take up the mantle of hero-scientist when said wunderkind makes like a champ and shoots himself in the face. Soon we join our man on a heavy-handed trip to Jerusalem, where Israelis and Palestinians are sheltering harmoniously, their newfound common enemy stymied by — Jesus Christ — a giant wall. From there, he’s on to a Belarus Airways – which, discounting hefty funding from the Minsk Office of Tourism, I can’t even begin to explain – flight from the City of Peace, where Gerry’s handling of a telegraphed zombie attack makes one long for the snake charming ways of Samuel L. Jackson.
Intermixed with Gerry’s globetrotting are scenes of his wife and daughters sulking safely on an aircraft carrier they’ve been deposited on after escaping Newark. The Lane women do little more than cry and lie in bed, speaking only to express their displeasure at the absence of their man. Wife Karin (Mereille Enos), whose name is used so seldom that I had to look it up on IMDb.com, persistently cradles a clunky satellite phone as proxy for her husband. Though an early moment of tension suggests brewing conflict between the carrier’s crew and the “non-essential personnel” that are Karin and her daughters – conflict that could have been used to give them something approaching agency – it never materializes. After all, it’s a man’s apocalypse. The ladies are better off occupying themselves with passive pursuits, like brooding and sleeping.
World War Z doesn’t so much unfold as it does advance, like each sequence were a level in a video game. If this makes it sound fun, trust me, it’s not. From Pitt’s vanilla everyman to the barely visible female characters, right down to the foolish sound effects (the zombies spit out noises that seem to have been recycled from Jurassic Park), this movie plays out like two hours inside the imagination of a boring little boy.
In the movie’s obvious climax, a light bulb goes off in Gerry’s head and he uses science to protect his fellow man against the zombies. The day has been saved – temporarily, of course. Plenty of room is left for a sequel, which the Hollywood Reporter says has been green-lighted in the wake of Z’s nearly $120 million opening weekend. That’s the most a live-action film has grossed in a weekend since the release of Avatar, itself the malformed brainchild of a boring little boy. Big profits will justify a big budget for World War Z’s sequel. Here’s hoping Foster and co. use it wisely and, like a far better zombie movie of recent years, give their audience the benefit of a Bill Murray cameo.