Video review: "World War Z"

The best movie review I saw of “World War Z” was actually a Venn diagram by The Oatmeal, one of the sharpest webcomics around. In the area between the overlapping circles that showed everything the book and the film had in common, it simply read: “It’s titled World War Z.”

Hilarious, and true. Because if you go into this big-budget horror/disaster thinking it bears anything more than a passing resemblance to the novel by Max Brooks, you’re bound to come away disappointed.
Which isn’t to say the movie they did make is terrible. It’s merely OK, with a few highly engaging action sequences interspersed with stuff that is loopy and/or dull.

Good, bad or indifferent, it’s just not the book.

While Brooks opted for a journalistic approach following an ensemble cast of characters, director Marc Forster and his trio of screenwriters went with a standard leading man story. Brad Pitt plays Gerry Lane, a former United Nations investigator picked to lead the team tracking down the source of the plague rapidly turning the world’s population into a swarm of zombies.

He travels the globe, including a stop in Jerusalem for an epic battle against a horde of undead attempting to scale the ancient city’s walls. He picks up new allies along the way, but also loses many good people.

Forster is ham-handed at the non-special effects action scenes, to the point we sometimes have trouble discerning exactly what’s happening. One fight-and-flight up a skyscraper stairwell looks like it was shot with a camera draped in dark cloth.

Things build up to a decent but rather predictable showdown in a remote laboratory where the ultimate zombie cure can be found. Again, this veers wildly from the book, where the only panacea for the outbreak was: “Kill all the zombies.”

Personally, I would love to see a faithful adaption of “World War Z” – as soon as Hollywood gets around to making it.

Video goodies are so-so. The DVD version gets you exactly nothing, so you’ll have to spring for the Blu-ray upgrade to get any extras.

The highlight is an unrated version of the film featuring more gruesome action that in the watered-down PG-13 theatrical edition. You also get six featurettes on the making of the film, bringing the book to the screen (sort of), and the scientific realities behind zombie mythology.

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Review: "World War Z"

The thing you have to understand about zombie movies is that we've reached the point where virtually every example is a hybrid comedy. Winks and smirks have become an indelible part of stories about the walking undead. There's gore and death, but we take it sardonically -- even cheering when a loathsome human takes the bite.

People thought "Shaun of the Dead" was such a revelation, but all it really did was take a genre that was 60/40 horror-to-funny and flip it around.

That changed with the novel "World War Z," which approached the notion of a zombie apocalypse with total earnestness. Author Max Brooks, following up on "The Zombie Survivor Guide," tackled the material with a completely different mindset from the familiar ragtag group of survivors gradually getting chomped.

Brooks had an almost journalistic approach, relating vignettes from myriad different characters and perspectives from all over the globe. Rather than a single dominating story thread, it was a patchwork of diverse tales skillfully woven into a pattern.

The long-gestating movie starring Brad Pitt and directed by Marc Forster ("Monster's Ball") takes the mindset of the book, and throws away most everything else. The focus is on Gerry Lane, a former United Nations investigator tasked with finding the source of the virus that is rapidly turning normal people into ferocious flesh-eaters. Gerry, and nearly everything that happens to him, is a concoction of the movie.

In effect, they kept Brooks' frame but painted a completely different picture inside it. The result is plausibly entertaining, and commendable for the sober way it approaches the concept of a plague of undead.

About those zombies. Like other recent iterations of their ilk, a person can morph into one in a matter of seconds after being bit. They're of the "fast zombie" variety, running and jumping faster than an Olympic-level human athlete, and have a tendency toward spasmodic twitching and clattering their teeth, like they can't wait to sing their fangs into you. They seem to behave with a collectively mind at times, working cooperatively to scale high walls and other feats we've never seen before.

It's a novel, unnerving approach.

After an intro in which Lane gets his wife and two daughters to safety aboard a Navy ship, he's strong-armed into leading an expedition to South Korea, where it was believed the outbreak first started. His further questing takes him to Jerusalem and then Wales, his allies rapidly getting picked off, as he frantically searches for a weakness in the virus.

Some of the story is extremely effective, such as the rapid spread of the virus amongst a jetliner full of passengers. James Badge Dale has a memorable turn as an Army officer cut off from his command, who's adopted a doggedly systematic approach to fighting zombies.

Other parts are just loopy, such as an encounter with a rogue CIA agent who's pulled out all his own teeth and has a nutty theory about the Jews having known about the danger all along. Turns out he's right (!), leading to a sequence in Israel that strains credulity. Although we do pick up another interesting supporting character there, Daniella Kertesz as no-nonsense soldier Segen.

A trio of screenwriters keeps the audience guessing, though some of the contortions of the plot sap energy from the proceedings. The tamed-down PG-13 violence doesn't help, nor does Forster's ham-handed camera work during many of the action scenes. A chase up a building stairwell is so murky and jangled, we can barely tell what's going on.

(Definitely pass on the 3-D upgrade, which hardly makes a difference other than rendering the image even dimmer.)

I like the idea of "World War Z" more than the movie they actually made. I suppose a jumble of random characters wouldn't have been possible for a mainstream movie. But the filmmakers end up jettisoning the very thing that made Brooks' book special.

Review: "Machine Gun Preacher"

"Machine Gun Preacher" is one of those stories that if it wasn't based on reality, few people would buy it.

Gerard Butler plays Sam Childers, a biker hoodlum who goes straight after discovering Jesus, and builds a church across the street from his house for sinners like himself. This would be enough for most movies, but for "Preacher" it's a mere jumping-off point: Sam goes to Uganda, is repulsed by the bloody civil war spilling over there from Sudan, and dedicates his life to establishing and protecting an orphanage.

But Sam is no pacifist "lamb of God" type of preacher -- he believes the Lord wants not sheep, but wolves with teeth who can fight the evildoers. The film's title is not just hyperbole: Sam gets into frequent firefights, and mows down more bad guys than the first couple of Rambo flicks.

Director Marc Forster ("Finding Neverland") and screenwriter (and Indianapolis native) Jason Keller curiously do not focus too much on the right or wrong of this American bringing the fight to the rebels, who kill wantonly and kidnap children to fight for them as enslaved soldiers. It's more an interior exploration of Sam, and the toll a life of such fierce commitment to a cause takes on his family and psyche.

The bad guys are referred to as simply the LRA, but after a bit of Googling I discover that stands for Lord's Resistance Army. It turns out the Sudanese rebels, led by self-described mystic Joseph Kony, are Christians who follow an apocalyptic form of the religion based on a particularly harsh (mis)interpretation of the Ten Commandments.

This would make for an interesting dichotomy, the two holy men each fighting for their version of the Bible. Forster and Keller briefly flirt with this direction, personified by a female doctor who points out that Kony started out much as Sam did, professing to save the members of his flock from the depravity of the other side.

But as soon as "Machine Gun Preacher" looks like it's going to tackle some tough issues, and really put its protagonist under a microscope, it pulls back and settles for familiar tropes, such as Sam's wife (Michelle Monaghan) calling to complain that he never spends time with his family, they're running out of money, etc.
Not 30 minutes earlier, she was telling Sam to suck it up after the rebels burned down the orphanage, calling it a test from God and to just build it all over again.

Michael Shannon adds a few notes as Donnie, Sam's former running buddy who can't shake off the lure of drugs and crime as easily as Sam did. But his character flits in and out of the story in a seemingly arbitrary way.

Butler is a fiery presence as Sam, and some of the scenes where he witnesses the atrocities of war -- one woman is brought in to the clinic with her lips hacked off, for having talked back to rebel soldiers -- have a genuine visceral punch.

But for much of the time, "Machine Gun Preacher" is curiously flat and wandering. It seems to think that by simply presenting the reality of a colorful man, you don't need to do anything else.

2 stars out of four