At what point does something cool, become not so cool anymore? What comes to my mind would be tattoos, I mean it was cool right until your grandmother started getting them as well. For the last ten years it seems zombies have taken over both television and movies some being both funny and scary, I mean zombies are living their best afterlife right now. So that means it was only a matter of time before someone tackled the genre and quite possibly make ghouls uncool once again.
In the small town of Centerville things are just feeling a little off lately. The days seem longer and the animals are disappearing, so something is up. Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray) the town’s Chief of Police is a guy a few years past the time when he was supposed to retire and has a “been there, done that” kind of attitude. His other two officers are Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver) who seems to think everything will end badly and Mindy Morrison (Chloë Sevigny), who is not really ready for real police work. Things come to head after an attack at the local diner, what looks like was the result of a wild animal or maybe even a pack of wild animals. Ronnie though has a different opinion, he believes it was the undead that caused the damage. Soon the town is full of zombies which isn’t a good thing for the town residents and it leaves the local police to figure out just how to survive the night and rid the town of its new visitors.
Hearing that Jim Jarmusch made a zombie movie got me pretty excited, I mean it’s Jim Jarmusch. That excitement though didn’t last long into the film, as you got the feeling that The Dead Don’t Die might be a little too meta for its own good. The things that the film does have going for it though is the great cast, especially Driver, whose dead pan performance is right on target. While the cast has moments of greatness, the rest of the film seems to miss what it was aiming for and comes off as slow and more often than not, not funny. In fact, Jarmusch does something not many have done before, and that is making Bill Murray not funny. An incredible feat to be sure, I know Jarmusch is an acquired taste, and I have enjoyed several of his films, but I just couldn’t get into this one, maybe the goal of the movie was to turn us all into zombies, because watching this makes you feel close to nothing.
