a review of 丧尸乐园2

HOOPTOBER, AFTERNOON TWENTY-EIGHT: Caught this at a Saturday matinee before going to a Halloween party later that evening. To tell the truth, the most unsettling thing about this movie was an early scene with Harrelson and Eisenberg tooling around in a zombie-apocalypse ravaged shopping mall, ostensibly dormant since 2009-ish in the movie's universe. Among the recognizable chain stores is a Waldenbooks with 100% genuine signage; Given that Waldenbooks hasn't existed as a chain since 2011, this couldn't have been an operating mall where they shot the movie after-hours. This was a straight-up deadmall that had been left that way for a minimum of 8 YEARS -- probably a little while longer than that. It's a reminder of the actual economic apocalypse that hit around the time of the first Zombieland, one that we still haven't fully recovered from and show all of the signs of slipping back into under the current administration. OK, so about the movie? If you still have warm feelings about the first movie, this is basically just more of the same 10 years later. The action is still pretty solid, and there's a couple of fun setpieces with decently-executed CGI zombie gore effects, even if everybody involved from the four Oscar-nominated leads on down seem like they're slumming in some way. The script definitely feels like something that's been sitting around since 2009, and some of its characters and situations (like the new "dumb blonde" character, or the wholly improbable hippie commune/stronghold) feel like something written even earlier than that. It's not outright bad, but it feels a mite creaky for a major comedy release in 2019.