Sunday, June 23, 2013

Movie Review: World War Z

 Before I get into the review, I have two things to say. First, within the ‘monster universe’ I like Zombies the least. At least vampires are seductive and sexy. Werewolves are animalistic and .. sexy. Ghoest are terrifying but kind of cool. Zombies? Zombies are unattractive, not especially bright, have no charm to speak of and their cannibals… Gross!

Having said that, I went into World War Z with an open mind. As always, I saw it at a morning show. It’s always a good thing for a film’s box office when a 10:15 a.m. has a healthy audience. It is also good for the film when there is spontaneous applause when the credits begin to roll. What that says to me is that regardless of what the critics say, if this is your kind of movie. Then you’ll probably like it.

We never find out exactly how World War Z started. Basically former UN operative Gerry (Brad Pitt) and his wife Karen (Mireille Enos) are the happy parents of two happy daughters. While taken then to school, all hell breaks loose. Really it does. A traffic jam turns into madness and mayhem when zombies take to the street and begin turning people into zombies.

Brad Pitt gets called back to duty and before we know it, he’s jet-setting around the world – from South Korea to Israel to Europe in search of Patient Zero or some kind of cure.

The action starts and never stops. However, there is a great deal of humanity to the activities that make the action more than just gratuitous scenes action for the sake of action. I also appreciated the fact that the gory was kept to a minimum. Flesh-eating zombies can give filmmakers carte blache to get all bloody and gory and gross. Thankfully, they didn’t go that route.

Can’t say I loved it but I liked it a lot more than I thought I would.

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