Blazed Movie Reviews: ‘World War Z’

Paramount Pictures

Oh, man, this is a mess. What an expensive, huge mess. I can’t smoke pot at home anymore because I have kids and they know cops, so I do it at the movies. This week, I saw World War Z, the massively-delayed, over-budget Brad Pitt zombie flick.

I feel bad about this because I’m kind of… over zombies. I mean, we get it. Back when it was basically just George Romero and some Italian dudes making zombie movies, they were still interesting. But now literally every video game has a zombie in it. There’s a zombie TV show that’s been on for three seasons. We just had a zombie romantic comedy. World War Z is coming to the party pretty late, and it isn’t doing anything new or cool when it gets there.

Brad Pitt plays a UN weapons inspector who is tasked with finding the source of the outbreak, leading him to travel to South Korea and Jerusalem, among other places. So here’s my problem: the essential horror of a zombie movie is the idea that zombies are Closing In. They’re like the waves at high tide: they might not come all at once, but there’s no escape. So when you can just hop on a plane and fly to Wales or whatever it completely wrecks any tension you might have.

The movie’s just a bunch of stuff thrown together and none of it really works. Did you read the book? The book is pretty cool – it’s a bunch of stories from survivors, people who were there when it all started – but it wouldn’t make a good movie because of that. They took the title and the basic premise but they had to have A Hero for the audience to root for and that screwed everything up.

Look, I like Brad Pitt and he’s cool and it’s cool that he made this movie, but it probably would have come out better if it wasn’t a Brad Pitt movie. There’s a bit at the end where, in a lab full of scientists, it’s this UN guy who comes up with the secret for not getting bit by zombies that’s just ridiculous. Stuff like The Walking Dead works because no one is safe. When you have Brad Pitt as the lead, you know he’s not going to die. He’s not going to get bit. He’s going to Triumph and be Reunited with his Family for a Happy Ending because that’s the only formula that makes money.

The ending sets things up for a sequel but this movie has to make like a gazillion dollars for it to happen and I don’t see it. It’s better than a lot of the other junk that came out this summer, but it’s still not very good.

Disclaimer: I fixed all the typos and grammar errors but left all the other dumb stuff in.