Rating: 3/5 stars
Directed by: Ruben Fleischer
Starring: Jesse Eisenburg, Woody Harrelson

In “Zombieland,” a lighthearted movie that you could easily confuse for a video game, the world may look like a wasteland, but it’s really more of a play place. Highways are littered with abandoned cars ripe for the taking, convenience stores are fully stocked, and extra guns and ammo are always close at hand. But, as any Chuck E. Cheese veteran knows, the ball pit still has its rules.

Said veteran is Columbus (Jesse Eisenburg), antisocial college student and World of Warcraft weekend warrior, who adheres to his personal code like it’s gospel. Cardio, seatbelts, avoiding bathrooms. This is how you survive the zombie apocalypse while maintaining Michael Cera levels of wussiness.

For those with stronger stomachs, there’s always the way of the *badass*. And if you paint “3” of the doors to your Hummer and receive disproportionate levels of satisfaction from clobbering the slack-jawed undead with blunt instruments, you just might be Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), a redneck, whose search for the world’s last remaining Twinkies (“believe it or not, Twinkies have an expiration date,” he reminds us) causes his path to merge with Columbus’s.

Naturally, the two team up, and an awkward cross-country road trip commences. They meet a pair of con-artist sisters, and, also naturally, they decide to stick together. There’s car-ride banter, over-the-top fight scenes, slightly off-target pop culture references, and other motions to go through. There are rules to these things after all.

But unlike, say, “Shaun of the Dead,” a funny zombie movie, “Zombieland” is really more of a funny movie with zombies. Its best parts, namely trashing a Native-American gift shop and getting high at Bill Murray’s house, have nothing to do with the undead.

Moreover, the zombies themselves aren’t even treated as a threat. They’re obese slobs in black drool, and although they can still bite their way into the sinewy parts of an extra’s ankle, they’re nothing more than bullet sponges for anyone with a line to speak. Gone are the swiveling cameras, the jump cuts or anything else that might promote the zombie mystique, leaving them to hobble about, groaning appropriately, until some protagonist is kind enough to put them out of their misery. Teenage girls, in contrast, are much worthier things to fear.

And don’t get me wrong: This movie’s funny—hilarious, even. But its adherence to typical disaster-movie plots and its insistence on following them through causes it to blow by unspoiled material left on the side of the road. As a comedy, “Zombieland” is funny enough to sustain itself like any of its zombies: by hobbling around, picking bones clean and then moving on. Who knows—there might even be some Twinkies along the way.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-cIjPOJdFM