But then they get duped by a couple of girls. You’ve already got the T-shirt: neurotic virgin dork buddies up with pistol-whipping psycho hardass. Zombieland could have been just another classic action-comedy odd-couple road movie with additional dead people. Not that there isn’t refinement to characterisation. That general ancestry is nicely cited the moment he enters a supermarket and summons his prey with a few notes from the duelling banjos scene in Deliverance. Harrelson has been Hollywood’s go-to gunk-for-brains numbskull since he played a half-witted barman with the same name in Cheers.
#ZOMBIELAND MOVIE SCENE FULL#
Out on the road Columbus pairs up with Tallahassee in the welcome shape of Woody Harrelson, operating here in full redneck mode. And of course, careful avoidance of heroism. They involve splendidly nerdy advice like staying fit (it doesn’t pay to be a tubster in Zombieland) and buckling up your seat belt. Only the lonely are left, principally a weedy geeky student type called Columbus, named after the town he’s from (Jesse Eisenberg), who has avoided becoming zombie food by applying basic rules for survival which flash up in witty computer graphics. So anyway, America has succumbed to the eponymous infestation – don’t ask how, it just has (although mad cow disease is mentioned in dispatches). If it’s social commentary you’re after, suggest you go through some other portal in the multiplex. Could this be some kind of high-concept critique on the parlous moral state of the Land of the Free, ruled by the holy trinity of guns, greed and porno frat parties? Er, not as such. Welcome to the post-apocalyptic wasteland that is zombiefied America, terrorised by marauding undead feasting lustily on live flesh. (Apart from Saving Private Ryan, obviously.)