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Movie Review: Pride, Prejudice, And Zombies

 

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Call me prideful and prejudiced, but what a bad idea: the zombification of fiction. Yep, that means that the movie version of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is here and a movie that might have passed muster as a Saturday Night Live sketch struggles and strains on the movie screen.

Pride and Prejudice was an 1813 novel by Jane Austen about five husband-hunting sisters in a times-are-tough aristocratic family and the mother desperate to marry them off in 19th-century England. Destined to become an acknowledged classic, it was a comedy of manners addressing such themes as love, marriage, wealth, class, and family.
Elizabeth Bennett is the most independent-minded of the siblings, and her bumpy courtship with Mr. Darcy would become and remain one of the most cherished love stories in English literature down through the years.

Readers responded to their prideful and prejudiced behaviors as well as the ways in which lovers overcome troublesome social forces to find and experience love.
In short, Price and Prejudice has had a great run. But, apparently, one thing was missing: Zombies.

So Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the movie adaptation of the best-selling 2009 parody novel by Seth Grahame-Smith (who also wrote the book, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, and the screenplay for that dreadful film adaptation), arrives to help pick up the slack.

It's a mash-up that marries Austen's characters and narrative to a manifestation of our contemporary love of all things zombie. It does so by imagining an alternate universe in which a zombie outbreak has fallen on the land and zombies now roam the English countryside as a gory, undead threat and nuisance.

In this version, Elizabeth, played by Lili James, is a master of martial arts and weaponry – as are her four sisters -- and Colonel Darcy, played by Sam Riley, is quite the zombie slayer as well.
But to do their mating dance, the potential soulmates must unite on the bloody battlefield to overcome the army of zombies even as they engage in a slow-build climb to true love.
Writer and director Burr Steers ( Igby Goes Down, 17 Again, Charlie St. Cloud) mounts a handsome production but mixes the two genre with minimal success, to say the least. Scares? Where? Laughs? When?

Paging Sean of the Dead for advice on how to handle a hybrid.

Even if zombie mayhem is to be enjoyed on its own, what the heck is it doing lumbering around in Pride and Prejudice? Because all three items mentioned in the title are actually on display, the film gets a point or two for truth in advertising. But on every other level, it comes up quite a bit short. The frequent fight scenes are smartly choreographed, true, but they land as interruptions rather than highlights.

Which is why we too often find ourselves wishing all the zombie nonsense would quietly slip away and just allow James and Riley, who are fine, to play out resolute Elizabeth and moody Darcy's otherwise engaging love affair.

So we'll attack 2 stars out of 4 for a wrongheaded genre bender featuring bloodsucking, brain-eating demons for no real good reason. As a movie about the undead, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies isn't undead enough.

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