Dawn of the Dead (2004)

2004

Directed by Zack Snyder
Starring Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames, Jake Weber, Mekhi Phifer and Ty Burrell

You guys all know (and by "all" I do mean seven people) that I rail on zombie movies quite a bit.  There's no point going into the whole diatribe again, other than that I'll just reiterate one final time that it feels like there have been 17,000 of these things in the past decade or so in addition to everyone and their goddamn mother now watching The Walking Dead despite never having seen a horror movie in their lives.  Yeah.  Elitism.  And I swear that's the last I'll mention this ever, although I am reasonably certain that I said so for the last zombie movie I reviewed.  So...nothing means anything anymore, and nihilism rules here at the Lick Ness Monster Blog.  And that, my friends, might be the most random paragraph I'll type this year.  The blog has peaked, and it's time to retire.

Well, you guys aren't quite that lucky.  I realized that I completely forgot to mention that this particular little mini-series of reviews actually has a name - the New Year's RemakeUAry, as I'll be covering nothing but remakes throughout the first month of 2018.  Last week was Psycho, and this week is the 2004 Dawn of the Dead.  Folks, there were some big names behind this movie, with Zack Snyder in the director's chair for his feature film debut and James Gunn penning the script.  I'm always fascinated by the career trajectories some guys take, and somehow this film served as the ascension point to both guys becoming Kings of the Movie Industry.  Capitalized because Fuck You.  I'm not a big fan of either guy but I can't necessarily fault the Movie Gods for this judgment because this flick was quite successful.  A $100-million+ gross on a $25 million budget is always a nice take, especially for a horror movie.  And while I'm not especially fond of the flick, it does have its moments.  Let's get to some specifics.

As is commonly the case with horror movie and a big part of what makes them so awesome, this film has a dynamite slam-bang setup sequence.  We meet young nurse Ana (Sarah Polley, and what the hell ever happened to her?) at the end of a long shift who goes home to spend some quality time with her husband.  The following morning, one of their neighbors appears inside the house looking quite strange and...um...decayed.  I think you know where we're going from here.  Cue the husband biting it, followed by a cool opening credits montage that clues us in on the zombie apocalypse overtaking the world.  Within the next twenty minutes, we're introduced to most of the major characters that take us through the rest of the film - police sergeant Kenneth Hall (Ving Rhames), electronics guru Michael (Jake Weber), and criminal dude Andre (Mekhi Phifer) along with his pregnant wife.  Within short order and a few close calls later, the characters make their way to a nearby Milwaukee shopping mall where they barricade themselves inside against the zombie hordes, and the basic premise of the movie begins.

I'll give the George Romero original some credit here; in this reporter's opinion, it got a lot better use out of the mall itself.  For all of the bitching I do about zombie movies (and I do it a lot - to the point that anybody reading this right now is probably already checked out), that flick did a great job making the mall and its surroundings feel claustrophobic.  This one doesn't have anywhere near that effect.  Instead, it's all about action.  Already inside the mall are a group of guards who are proficient in the use of firearms, and they need it against these zombies since they freakin' RUN.  Now, I'm sure that Zack Snyder and James Gunn didn't invent running zombies, but I'll be damned if this wasn't the first I'd ever seen them onscreen.  It's kind of a double-edged sword; it was different and unexpected, but a lot of the tension was lost since the fast action resulted in a lot more of the "boo scare" horror that I've grown to hate so much in recent years.  Still, at least they look cool.

Since we're inside the mall now, it's time to get to some side plots.  The script by Gunn definitely has some unique twists on the original material here.  Eventually, another batch of fresh humans shows up at the mall where they are welcomed(ish) by the original group of characters, resulting in a bit where Kenneth watches one of them slowly turn in front of his eyes.  There's also the pretty emotional story of Andre's wife who has been scratched by one of the creatures, and that birth scene...man, it's something else.  Kind of sick, but something else.  And then there's the whole saga of our characters trying to communicate with a survivor taking up residence in a building across the lot from the mall that gives us some of our opportunities for the humans to venture out into danger, often to get attacked and bitten.  Gotta have more zombies and conflict, ya know.  Oh, and there's also a couple romantic subplots that terminally bored me the first time I saw the movie and still kinda suck all these years later, so the less said about them the better.

Time to continue beating on the dead horse.  The original movie had a really good finale because we spent a lot more time with a smaller group of characters.  Thus, when their mall abode got busted up, we were invested.  This time around, there were just SO MANY characters and smaller plots to keep track of...and that same effect wasn't there.  There's this whole scheme that they come up with involving outfitting a tractor-trailer with all sorts of weapons and driving out of there, and I dunno, I liked it better when it was called The Road Warrior.  And that's original Mad Max, not that new piece of crap.  Come at me, bros.  Second time in as many weeks I've snuck that cringe-worthy phrase in.

Alright.  With that, it's time to dispense some of that beloved Lick Ness Judgment on this bitch.  My favorite thing about Dawn of the Dead version 2004 is that the performances are awesome.  While the characters aren't especially deep, everybody in this film gave it their all, especially Rhames and Phifer.  Throughout the '90s and early 2000s, I dare say that no actor was better at playing the badass role than Ving Rhames.  Marcellus Wallace ain't no bitch, indeed.  The creature effects stuff from Heather Langenkamp (yes, that Heather Langenkamp - Nancy Thompson herself from A Nightmare on Elm Street) and her production company is top notch.  And the movie is also scary when it wants to be, particularly during the first trimester.

However, it's also plenty NOT scary when it wants to be, which unfortunately is most of the running time.  This starts with the whole issue of the running zombie.  In nerd circles, you could probably find no less than 147 debates going on at various online forums about whether running zombies are scarier or less scary than slow zombies.  Put me in the slow crowd, for all of the reasons that I spelled out a few paragraphs ago.  But even in the movie's quieter moments, with various characters slowly turning over into flesh-munchers inside the mall, it's a lot more about the effects and the slam scares than it had to be.  This film just doesn't stick with you as much as the 1978 classic did.  That is about the best summary I can give of this otherwise pretty presentable remake.

** 1/2 out of ****.  I give Snyder and Gunn credit; they tried their ass off to make a new movie and put their own spin on the source material.  The result is a movie that you can enjoy for what it is, but it's not any more than that.  And 'that' is a 2000s action movie.