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The Dead Don’t Die
***
Dir: Jim Jarmusch
Starring: Adam Driver, Chloe Sevigny, Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton
(USA, 15 1hr 45mins)
Cult director Jim Jarmusch turns his ever-quirky, laconic and offbeat eye to the zombie genre in this star-studded if ultimately underwhelming genre piece. It seems so aware of itself it gets in the way of any sense of jeopardy. Adam Driver, Chloe Sevigny and Bill Murray play three diligent cops in a typical American town, Centerville, peopled by eccentric locals like Steve Buscemi’s reactionary Farmer Miller, the grizzled Tom Waits’ Hermit Bob and Caleb Landry Jones’ comicbookshop/gas station owner.
Their ‘normality’ is about to be destroyed by the arrival of Tilda Swinton’s Scottish samurai, who has taken over the local funeral home and Carol Kane’s character, a drunk, who rises from the dead. Graves are spewing out bodies, thanks to some non-specific polar fracking, and the trio are forced to do battle with dead teens moaning ‘wifi’ and a coffee-obsessed zombie Iggy Pop, amongst others.
Murray as ever is very watchable along with Sevigny and Driver who prove a winning trio in a shaggy dog story with no real sense of purpose or urgency. Swipes at consumerism are made but do not have the bite of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, where zombies still go to the shopping mall. The Dead Don’t Die adds very little to the growing zombie movie pantheon, apart from its louche freewheeling style. Relentlessly self-aware of the zombie films that have come before and full of cinephiliac in-jokes, The Dead Don’t Die forgets to have any tension or drama. Characters are flippantly dispatched, played by great actors who are clearly enjoying themselves – Danny Glover, Selena Gomez, Rosie Perez amongst them but the plot proceeds aimlessly, making it hard to care about anyone in a film this arch and meta. A somewhat self-satisfied entry in a genre suffering from overkill.
words Keiron Self
Opens July 12