Synopsis
The Dead are walking again, and zombies are... well not exactly ruling the earth as in Dawn/Day of the Dead, but kind of infesting it. A group of military deserters (actually seen briefly robbing the characters in Diary of the Dead) make for a Massachussets island in hope of a place to ride out the semipocalypse, but once there find an old human feud is more pressing than the zombies are.
Good Bits
The characters often make or break a zombie movies, since they're inevitably human stories with zombie backdrops. In this case the humans fall just on the right side of nondescript. The locals are fairly interesting, if a little cliche, and the military types have a nice relationship among them even if only a couple are particularly likeable. There's a few decent Romero-esque zombie slapstick moments in there too that made me chuckle. The zombies themselves are the good kind too. They're slow, not always sure that they should be eating people, and very stupid. It's the balance between menace, repulsion, and pity that only Romero has ever managed to hit for me.
Bad Bits
There just doesn't seem to be a whole lot of zombie activity. Is this the second zombie apocalypse? The one that hit the handful of survivors of the first one? Because there sure isn't a whole lot of population coming after the survivors and the zombies aren't threatening at all in the small numbers used. It's just not very apocalyptic at all. There's also some pretty poor slapstick to go with the good stuff. It looks like they watched Zombieland and though they'd stick some of their jokes in. Good in Zombieland, bad here. Over the top just doesn't fit the rest of the film. Lastly, he's still plugging away at the smart zombie thing. If there was some form of progression (as seen in Day and Land) then I could accept it as his vision of the dead slowly regaining their function. But he seems to have twisted it in this case to include the question of zombie salvation, and then lost all continuity with his zombie evolution.
Oh, did I say lastly? Not quite, he stuck in an annoying smart-ass teenager who brings nothing to the film. He introduces a money plot element even though it's clearly useless because there's nowhere to spend it, he's got the shooting skills of a gunfighter for no apparent reason, and his smug commentry on technology is embarrassing (he criticises a laptop for being 'a crappy PC', and produces an iPod as a superior computer).
Conclusion
You may have noticed the 'bad' paragraph is larger than the 'good'. In fact, if I'd written a 'meh' paragraph that would have been the biggest. The effects are motly okay, the plot's workable, the pace is fair. But by definition there's not a lot to say about the mundane stuff. Weighing it up I'd say it was worth watching if you're a fan of Romero or Zombie films, unlike Diary, but despite the box claiming it's his best since Dawn of the Dead, it was pretty uninspiring.
Rating
