World War Z
★★★
Dir: Marc Forster
(2013)
Film making chameleon Marc Forster certainly had a fair amount of time to ponder World War Z during its infamously painful re-write and re-shoot production. Max Brooks' sociopolitical zombie novel must have been laid out in little piles all over a million separate production offices before this thing finally made it to location and million more during the editing process. Put simply, the film is a wild and hilariously uneven but enjoyably big budget goreless globe-trotting zombie movie; It's sad then that this fierce and sprawling book is viciously and superficially reduced to a hand full of revelatory plot points sandwiched between some spectacular set pieces.
Producer and star Brad Pitt plays UNO hands on man Gerry Lane who is caught in a rather Emmerichian traffic jam with his family when a full-blown case of human rabies arrives up ahead. More Boyle than Romero our "zombies" (oddly the word is used repeatedly throughout World War Z) sprint through the city of Philadelphia infecting their bitten in a rather speedy 12 seconds. This condensing of even the genres infection time is telling of much of Forsters film which seems in far too much of a rush to drag Lane away from his family and from one military facility to another as he tracks the source of the virus and looks for a cure.
Light on plot and heavy on CGI action it may be but there are elements of World War Z which are well measured and even sporadically spectacular. The nearly bloodless film, edited to high heaven to remain within a box office friendly classification no doubt, has had to be very smart in amping tension and scares; No more so in the films remarkably low-key finale in a lab in wintery Wales. It's the oddly films most assured section and it comes complete with a sweet little Peter Capaldi appearance.
Though fans of The Thick of It will definitely get a little kick in seeing Malcolm Tucker side by side with Brad Pitt in a Zombie film there really isn't much beyond a hand full big budget smashes and crashes to lift this crazy mess anywhere near the top of the pile. It blows through town with little consequence; its brisk sprint through an entire apocalypse could have been far more chilling in a slow George Romero like ramble. The highs are certainly high and at times the lows are nearly buried but even as the quieter moments are crushed between the loud ones with Pitt looking progressively more tired as our Zombie Florence Nightingale, there is much to like about WWZ.
