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| Directed and Written by Burr Steers |
Alo Party Peoples.
Let me tell y'all a little something about how I do what I do. If you've ever wondered how I or other critics are able to get out big comprehensive reviews before the movie comes out (or at least that's always the plan), that's because the studios usually hold special invite only screenings for critics a few days before wide release. It's a mutually beneficial process, we need the time to put together our columns and shows in time for release day, and the studios want those reviews running on release day for publicity. This process, called "press screening", happens in most cities of sufficient size, and in Dallas a lot of them happen at the Angelika Film Center at Mockingbird Station. Now, the studios want a full house to get as many people's reaction to the movie as possible, so these screenings are often intentionally overbooked, which means you have to get there early to get a seat, especially at the Angelika because it's a nice theater but not an especially big one. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is the only screening for a big studio release I've been to where they failed to get a full house. They couldn't get people to see it even when they were giving it away for free.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a great period piece in that it perfectly captures that one moment about a decade ago when we all suddenly couldn't get enough of zombies, when fanfiction and mashup culture were still mysterious new things as far as most people were concerned, and thus this kind of post-post-post-modern meta "ironic" genre fusion was still considered a novel concept. It's based off of a book of the same name that literally came about after the author drew a monster and a public domain novel out of a hat. It's not like I don't get the appeal of this kind of deadpan humor, take Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter as an example. At first, the joke is "Heh. President Lincoln didn't actually fight vampires.", but then you watch it and the joke becomes "Huh. President Lincoln didn't actually fight vampires, but this is presented as a semi-serious work of historical fiction as though he had.". The joke is that the joke doesn't know that it's a joke, and it can work really well in literature, where you can suggest the image of absurd things like Mr. Darcy using carrion flies to detect the undead or Abraham Lincoln breaking down the door of a slave owning vampire family and personally beheading them with a silver axe, and the reader can imagine the details however they want.
The problem with adapting that is, film can't rely on suggestion. By its very nature, film is built on depiction, which means that the dissonance is harder to hide or make light of unless you go for pure comedy, and successful versions of this dance do. Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse, another film that feels like a 2000s nostalgia throwback released a decade early, pulls that off. But Pride and Prejudice and Zombies takes itself just seriously enough that you can't think of it as a mindless popcorn flick but are just stylized enough that you can't take it too seriously. The result is a film that has no idea who it's trying to appeal to and thus ends up being a semi-serious adaptation of Pride and Prejudice that keeps interrupting itself with an ongoing period zombie outbreak in the English countryside.
Sure, that's essentially what Pride and Prejudice and Zombies the book was, but like I said before, in a book it's easier to do this kind of genre fusion mashup stuff because in a book suspension of disbelief is easier to maintain. In a movie the tonal whiplash just feels awkward unless it's super stylized, but this isn't. It feels like they wanted to make a Matthew Vaughn film (think Kingsman or Kick-Ass), but Matthew Vaughn... is a better technical director, for starters - but he also knows how to blend sincere starry eyed enthusiasm with cartoon hard-R ultra violence and make it look like it's easy to do. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies fails at both, it's like a bored fourteen year old in English class doodling amateur graphic novels in the margins of their notebook, they clearly worked very hard on it, but it takes itself too seriously to be genuinely fun, and trying to hold back the violence to avoid having any trouble for what they've drawn was the wrong creative decision. Especially when there really isn't anything else for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to prop itself up on. The cast ranges from forgettable to terrible, and it rarely embraces the kind of absurdity inherent to its own premise. Normally this would be the kind of thing I'd tear into, but there's so little meat on the bones that doing so is like trying to tackle a cloud of smoke.
For any reason someone might want to see Pride and Prejudice and Zombies there is something I can recommend instead. If you want a mid-2000s zombie throwback, just rent Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse. If you want a hyper stylized period horror film, rent Crimson Peak in a few weeks, or see The Revenant if you're more in the mood for an art film. If you want Pride and Prejudice... then just read Pride and Prejudice, why did you even consider this? In short, it's not worth your time, and it's definitely not worth mine.
Have a nice day,
Greg.B
FINAL RATING: 2/5
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