Written by Tom Moore
Though it may claim to have the greatest cast ever (dis)assembled, writer/director Jim Jarmusch struggles to deliver an entertaining zombie movie with The Dead Don’t Die and instead creates a dry, boring, bloodless experience that attempts to evoke earlier zombie movies, but barely scratches the surface.
The film focuses on the residents of a town called Centerville just as polar fracking has begun to change the Earth’s rotation and is causing the dead to rise from their graves. Right from the start, you can tell that Jarmusch is going for a specific storytelling style as well as a specific kind of humor. While zombie films have mostly focused on viral outbreaks and “the infected,” The Dead Don’t Die goes back to the basics that George A. Romero established when he created Night of the Living Dead back in 1968. There’s no patient zero or worry about air contamination or sprinters, just the good old-fashioned walking dead lurking through the streets in search of human flesh.
Personally, I found it refreshing to see someone going back to basics with the zombie genre and the film looks like it could belong in that classic era. The idea of Centerville being “the best place to live” is straight out of the ’60s, the costume design is very vintage and has that “small town” look to it, and the rules that the characters establish about the zombies are straight from Romero’s work. That is, other than that they’re afraid of fire, and Bobby (Caleb Landy Jones) even makes a reference that Zoe’s (Selena Gomez) car looks like one Romero would use in his films. Honestly, the film itself looks like a colorized version of Night of the Living Dead at times and I can’t help but think how cool the film would look in black and white.
However, while Jarmusch captures the visual style of Romero,the substance just isn’t there. The humor Jarmusch uses is incredibly dry and it can make the film kind of a bore to watch. It’s the same kind humor seen in films like Fargo or anything made by Wes Anderson, but it feels even drier here. If the dry humor was just used for characters like Chief Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray) and Officer Ronnie (Adam Driver), as their line delivery is great, the humor and the running gags wouldn’t lose their luster so quickly. However, it’s littered throughout so there’s no break from it and if you’re not a fan of drier humor, you’re in for what could be an extremely dull experience.
Even some of the more self-referencing moments of the film don’t always work. While it’s funny to see a Star Wars reference directed at Driver and some funny talk about him also knowing that there’s a script, it eventually becomes so overdone that I had to ask: “What the hell is happening?” There’s no real payoff to the film’s meta moments and the running gags that come with them just become tiring. The first time the joke is made about the film’s theme song, “The Dead Don’t Die” by Sturgill Simpson, it got a chuckle out of me, but it’s done about seven times after that and it becomes so repetitive that I now pretty much hate that song. Even the concepts about the zombies spouting lines about what they liked when they were alive is funny the first time, but this joke is beaten in so much that it’s annoying.
I will say that the zombies have a nice look to them and the practical make-up effects are cool. Even seeing some of the film’s bigger stars as zombies was kind of funny. However, there’s an effect used for killing the zombies that really bugs me and it’s just kind of confusing. Instead of blood or guts coming from the zombies, ash just spouts from their headless corpses and it’s incredibly underwhelming. It’s honestly just confounding to see and all it does is service some metaphorical nonsense that comes later in the film. As a fan of zombie movies, it’s pretty much an expectation to have some bloodshed to go along with zombie kills, so not seeing that here just rubs me the wrong way.
I also have to say that the cast of “main characters” is way too big and most of them are woefully either under-utilized or misused. Most of the big names in this movie don’t make much of an impact and there’s such little emotional connection to have to them. There’s a lot of plot threads within them all, like the CDC kids, the idea of a relationship between Bobby and Zoe, and really all of Hermit Bob, that just get cut short and don’t really matter when they maybe could’ve. Also, in the case of Gomez’s Zoe, I couldn’t help but feel as if she was constantly treated as a sexual object. It feels very out of touch at times and there’s never really a point to it, so it just comes off as a little gross.
Jarmusch’s worst offense, though, comes in the form of the film’s final metaphorical message as it’s incredibly forced and just made me annoyed. There’s not much building towards the film’s thoughts about what zombie’s mean and he offers no solutions to the problem he acknowledges, so it comes off as if he’s making fun of his audience. Don’t get me wrong, Romero had messages and acknowledged social themes in his zombie flicks, however, he knew how to subtly build them throughout his entertaining stories and make the pay-off memorable and thought-provoking—something that Jarmusch clearly doesn’t understand. It’s actually fumbled so badly that rather than making me think and want to applaud, it just made me groan.
The Dead Don’t Die is an incredibly missed opportunity to bring the classic style of Romero back to big screen and add something unique to the zombie genre. Instead, Jarmusch’s choices don’t mix well and the results in one of the dullest, most boring, and disappointing zombie movies I’ve ever seen.
