When I came across The Dead Don’t Die on streaming, I was surprised. I had heard nothing about this horror comedy with Adam Driver and Bill Murray before or after it came out. Looking at the rest of the cast, you would have assumed this was something that got at least a little bit of marketing. Tilda Swinton, Danny Glover, Steve Buscemi, Tom Waits, Selena Gomez, and several other recognizable faces fill out the cast to make this quite the ensemble. The trailer showed promise with some meta-jokes involving Adam Driver’s matter-of-fact delivery that they were dealing with zombies. Then, I watched it…I can see why the movie studios have done their best to sweep it under the rug.

Pros

A handful of moments in which the jokes landed, mostly due to Adam Driver
Decent makeup and practical gore effects

Cons

Not funny or scary 99% of the time
Some jokes that weren’t funny the first time get repeated numerous times
Meta humor comes and goes when convenient
Some terrible acting and direction
Atrocious dialogue that sounds like a middle-school student wrote it
Countless useless scenes that go nowhere and overstay their welcome
Cheap-looking digital effects

Plot & Thoughts

Police Chief Cliff (Bill Murray) and Officer Ronnie (Adam Driver) are having a rather uninteresting day in the small rural town of Centerville, aside from the fact that at 8 PM, the sun was still in the sky as though it were noon. The news keeps bringing up some oddities that are occurring around the world and suggesting that it has to do with fracking being done at the poles of the Earth. It’s all a little vague, but it’s being implied that the environmentally unfriendly actions of big corporations have altered the Earth’s rotation in a way that something has gone wrong. As a result, the dead start rising from the grave and slowly, oh so slowly, spreading a zombie apocalypse one person at a time. As the plot drags its shambling feet like the walking corpse that it is, various other characters who make up the town of eccentric goons are introduced, as well as characters visiting the town on a road trip before they’re quickly forgotten. At some point, there’s an alien abduction, some 4th-wall-breaking jokes, a particular country song is played far too many times, and the film ends the way most zombie movies do.

If Shaun of the Dead is the pinnacle example of a great zombie horror comedy film—which it is—The Dead Don’t Die is at the polar opposite of the spectrum, and this pole has been fracked up the a$$ like the Earth’s poles were in this movie’s plot. I do not know what was going through the head of writer/director Jim Jarmusch when he was making this movie. I do not know if anyone around him was giving him constructive criticism that he was ignoring, or if it was a bunch of people who just agreed with every decision he was making. I just know that I was bored out of my mind for the initial 90 minutes and frustrated by the remaining runtime for how squandered an opportunity this was. I laughed less than five times, with those consisting almost entirely of snorts and barely chuckles. The one time I actually exhaled enough to call it a real laugh was when Adam Driver walked into a restaurant, saw two disemboweled corpses, and said, “Oh, yuck!” The rest of the time there was meant to be any humor was all half-baked, poorly written jokes that didn’t go anywhere. It’s one of those movies where the comedy didn’t ever rise above a “Wouldn’t it be funny if” scenario, and there was no added complexity to it. Having Tilda Swinton be an eccentrically weird Scottish samurai who turns out to be an alien and is picked up by a UFO does not simply equal comedy.

There were also moments in which The Dead Don’t Die attempted to insert 4th-wall meta humor. Multiple times, characters acknowledged the recurring country theme song or the script of the movie, but it never amounted to anything more than an acknowledgment. Compare it to Shaun of the Dead, where they make the joke about “using the zed word” in a more natural conversation and jump back to it later in a high-stakes scenario to make it that much funnier. That joke doesn’t break the 4th wall, but it is meta enough for the audience to get it, and it never oversteps to the point where it doesn’t feel like something the characters wouldn’t say.

The meta-humor in The Dead Don’t Die is not natural, and it’s also inconsistent with the way the rest of the movie goes. It’s not like Deadpool or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, where it’s just an ongoing joke throughout the whole experience in which a character is winking at the audience and pointing out how you’re watching a movie. It's just the occasional joke where Adam Driver acknowledges that the stupid country song that played during the opening credits is playing again and calls it the “theme song,” or when he talks about how he knows that everything is going to end badly because he read the script. That’s not inherently funny. You have to do a little more than say that your characters know they’re in a movie. Also, having multiple characters say that they love the country song “The Dead Don’t Die,” having heard it multiple times, is not going to skew the audience in your favor, nor is it going to make them laugh the fifth time they’ve heard it.

Now, you might be asking, “What about the horror?” It sucks too. I’m sure you’re surprised. There is nothing remotely scary or tense about this movie. It disregards the deaths of significant and insignificant characters. There are numerous characters who die off-screen, including Selena Gomez and her boyfriends. When people die on-screen, it’s nothing like what you would expect in a zombie movie. It’s practically a PG-13 horror film by the standards of gore. I am no die-hard zombie fan, but I know that it is a sub-genre of horror that demands gore and lots of it. Once again, look at how Shaun of the Dead marries its horror with its comedy—between the jokes, there are some gruesome moments in that movie with visceral dismemberment, violence, gore, and guts. There are occasional snippets of horror in this that occur, but pretty much everything else is either watered down by CGI or not shown at all. Even in the final act, when the heroes are facing off against the zombie horde, they’re cutting off heads, and the body parts are disintegrating into dust.

This was an ensemble horror-comedy with a lot of recognizable faces and names on the bill, but if you’re expecting something that is even remotely as enjoyable as Mars Attacks!, you need to check your expectations. Not only does it not make decent use of its extensive cast, some of whom phone it in worse than Bill Murray does in the movies in which he clearly doesn’t want to be there. It doesn’t help that the director or editors didn’t bother to use better takes, either. There were multiple scenes with Danny Glover in which he flubbed a line, and they just kept rolling. He’s obviously getting older, and every actor has a flub, but you couldn’t do another take? Maybe that was the 20th, and they just said, “Forget it.” You’d think something with this many names would be better produced, but The Dead Don’t Die comes across almost like a student project. Considering that Jim Jarmusch has a lot of other credits, making adored indie or small-budget films, it seems odd that he would be fine to just leave mistakes like this in. I talked with a film enthusiast who considers Jarmusch an instrumental influence in his artistic life, and he even said he couldn’t defend this mess. Something clearly went wrong with this movie, and I just don’t know where to begin beyond what I’ve already mentioned, so I’ll just end the review there.

TL;DR

I did not have high expectations for The Dead Don’t Die, but this movie managed to disappoint on almost every level. Aside from one moment in which I truly laughed, I found it to be a dull and unfunny experience that was a waste of my time and everyone involved in it. When you have such a good example of a zombie movie that manages to be horrific and even a little scary while also being hilarious, as Shaun of the Dead, it is astonishing how bad this movie is by comparison. If you have not seen Shaun of the Dead and you are thinking of watching The Dead Don’t Die—even if it is purely out of the convenience of one over the other—you are not only doing yourself a disservice, you are committing self-harm, and you need to be stopped. Do not waste your time with this movie and buy/rent/watch Shaun of the Dead instead.

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