Movie Review: The Dead Don't Die (2019)

The Dead Don't Die (2019) written and directed by Jim Jarmusch

The apocalypse comes to Centerville when polar oil fracking causes a shift in the axis of the Earth, altering the amount of daylight and causing the dead to rise from their graves. Oh, and animals start acting weird too. Police Chief Cliff Robertson (played by Bill Murray, not by Cliff Robertson) rides around town observing the  meltdown of his small town society. Two zombies kill the late night staff at the local diner. The zombies are more excited to drink the coffee there than eat the people. Most of the zombies in the film go back to what they loved best in life, a trope that's been used many times before in zombie films. Officer Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver) is well aware that things are going to turn out badly though people don't believe him. He knows zombies are causing the trouble but it isn't till the whole graveyard turns out that everyone believes him. Many different little pockets of people try to hold out, but will anyone be safe?

The movie is meant to be a comedy but the jokes just don't work very well. Tilda Swinton plays a quirky mortician called Zelda Winston; Rosie Perez plays a TV reporter named Posie Juarez. That's sort of funny but not very clever. A lot of the other humor is more like social commentary than laugh out loud comedy. Most of the performances are very flat and emotionless, as if the actors are bored to be in a zombie movie. Some characters, like the kids from the juvenile detention facility, seem to be in the movie to pad out the running time--they don't really have anything to do with other characters and provide very little social commentary or humor. The whole movie struggles to be funny. Creating an unfunny comedy with Bill Murray is not the sort of achievement to brag about.

The special effects are a weird mixture. The zombies-eating-people moments are gruesome and realistic looking. The people-killing-zombies moments look like the special effects from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV show, i.e. bloodless, dusty, and twenty years ago. The moon has a strange glow that also looks like a home-generated special effect.

This movie really has nothing to recommend it.

Not recommended.