The Dead Don't Die

Zombie movies are hard to pull off anymore. Just do your standard "survivors running/fighting" or "zombie siege" movie, and it blends in and gets forgotten. But the movie can't just be zombies+gimmick. Shaun Of The Dead and Eat Brains Love are two great examples of what can be done with the zombie genre, but there's plenty more that were made with "what if we did THIS" in mind and nobody thought past that one twist. The Dead Won't Die is among that latter category. Jim Jarmusch's thought process seems to have been "zombies in Twin Peaks". That's it. There's characters that are weird for the sake of it, a quirkiness to the small town, and a self-awareness of this weirdness, but that's the extent of it. Hell, that summarizes the movie so much, I don't even need to do a plot recap. Zombies in Twin Peaks. That's it. That's your movie. For a while, it's okay. The humor is aiming for dry and clever, but more comes off as amusing if a bit insufferable, but it's okay. I don't know that I laughed out loud once, but I smiled, and I gave a "heh" a couple times, I think. For a director whose legacy, according to Wikipedia, is focusing more on mood and character development, there is none of the latter to be had, and the former seems to be "hipster twee". I wasn't a fan of the weird fourth wall breaks that seem to exist as some kind of inside joke maybe, but also break the tension because the characters are acknowledging they're characters. And the lame attempt at political "commentary" is more mindless mockery than anything -- I happen to be more on the side of the spectrum that's doing the mocking here, but that doesn't make it enjoyable. It just shows Jarmusch has nothing to say here other than pointing and laughing, which feels childish and stupid. But I was still okay with what I was seeing for the most part. It wasn't going to get the full boat, but it was aiming for a more positive review. And then the third act happens, and this movie falls off a cliff. No, it throws itself off a cliff. The movie drastically shifts tone, dropping the whimsy and quirky indie stuff for being a straight zombie movie, except when it doesn't, and Jarmusch crowbars the hipster cleverness into the moment with all the grace of the Kool-Aid Man entering a room. The change in mood isn't entirely a crime -- Shaun Of The Dead does this as well. But it also spent a lot of time making us care about the characters and the relationships between them. TDDD just props up these sketches for two acts, then goes about knocking them down. The change in tone doesn't result in anything, because the movie has done nothing for the raising of the stakes to matter. And then there's the actual filmmaking side of it. From what I've read, Jarmusch is very hands on during every point of the process, up to and including editing. Well, you could've fooled me, because this movie's third act feels more hastily whipped together than Lisa Simpson's Florida costume. Characters jump from place to place with no narrative explanation. Characters whom the movie has spent a fair amount of time are killed off-screen. The movie has loaded up on so many characters, it feels like it's in a hurry to wrap everything up, so the movie jumps around like a preschooler on a six pack of Red Bull trying to tell a story, but it's just broken and incoherent. And then there's a sudden revelation about one character that is so bizarre and pointless. And then the movie breaks the fourth wall again, acknowledges one character has read the script and knows how it will end, so what do they do? Commit to the ending, which isn't good. WHY HAVE SELF-AWARE CHARACTERS AT ALL?!? This third act alone is responsible from going from a 3 1/2 to a 2 1/2. It tanks any goodwill this movie has in a rushed, meandering, disconnected blur of tying off loose ends, a painful tonal shift, and a blur of bad editing and narrative choices. It feels like they got to the end, ran out of ideas, and just stitched together what they had. If this was intended from the get-go, yikes. Either way, it's a movie I can't recommend, both because it's target audience is so narrow I don't know anybody who would fit in it, and I can't recommend a movie this unfocused and smug.