Yup, you guessed it. It's "some time"
since the undead outbreak has occurred and survivors are living
in a fenced in city. The poor on the street and the rich in a
central skyscraper called Fiddlers Green. The rich are led by
Kaufman, who lives perched atop the skyscraper, much like the
plastic birds in a cage featured in the buildings lobby. They
are all white, Republican and well off, even have black butlers.
When public servant and zombie killer Cholo (John Leguizamo) wants
to buy his way into Fiddlers Green, Kaufman tells him that they
don't want his "type" living there and has him extracted
from the building. This sets him off. He steals a shit kicking
tank dubbed "Dead Reckoning" that is used to shoot and
run over the walking dead, and plans on aiming it's missiles at
Fiddlers Green. Cholos co-worker Riley (Simon Baker) is blackmailed
by Kaufman to get the tank back while the undead have
suddenly started to evolve and communicate and pick up weapons,
all of this on his "last night" (come on!) of working
for the Beauracratic system. Along with Riley are a gimp Charlie
(Robert Joy) and a prostitute Slack (nice name).
Asia Argento as Slack seemed like she could have added a lot
more excitement when we first see her in a cage fight with a couple
of zombies, but winds up not doing much at all. Simon Baker as
Riley is a standard hero type who dreams of getting the hell out
of hell, is overall good and does all he can with the hero archetype.
I've never been a Leguizamo fan, and his Cholo does not to help
convince me otherwise. Charlie on the other hand is the one human
I sympathized with most. Like a lost puppy with a melted face,
you really root for him because of his physical handicaps and
pure heart. Now, the gore. The "Dead" series is famous
for it's extreme gore. All the zombies get first class makeup
treatment, but for some reason I missed the blue-gray painted
zoms of "Dawn and "Day". They looked good, just
not scary. We had ridiculous Baseball player zombies, butcher
zombies, even clown zombies! The gut munching wasn't up to par
either. It's all in the dark so all that really looks good are
the close ups of the bites. The gore level was high for an R rating,
it just wasn't effective. So what we have in the end is a decent
action flick with zombies, very little suspense or likable characters,
and a message about a country being run by a bunch of assholes.
Being a hardcore fan I was expecting more I guess, but being objective,
I still don't think there was much there. Hopefully this will
be a hit here and in Europe and we will have a resurgence of cheap
knock offs like in the 80's (AHEM. Fulci). See it anyway because
there are a lot of "Wow cool" moments and cool gritty
grimy action. You might like it a lot more than I did. I'm going
to watch "City of the Living Dead" now.
