D.C.’s Take: Zom­bieland: Dou­ble Tap

“Zom­bieland: Dou­ble Tap” has fi­nally come out af­ter years of ask­ing for a se­quel to fi­nally hap­pen, but it had many a dif­fi­cult task to get through if you ask me. This is a se­quel where the orig­i­nal came out in the­aters ten years ago, and that’s rarely a good sign af­ter that span be­tween films. On top of that it is com­ing out at a time where zom­bies in me­dia kind of be­came over­ex­posed ever since “The Walk­ing Dead” over­stayed its wel­come. Luck­ily, there’s noth­ing to worry about right here. 

What’s the Story: Ten years af­ter meet­ing each other, Colum­bus (Jesse Eisen­berg), Tal­la­has­see (Woody Har­rel­son), Wi­chita (Emma Stone) and Lit­tle Rock (Abi­gail Bres­lin) are still stick­ing to­gether in the zom­bie-fu­eled world where they’ve pretty much be­come a fam­ily at this point as they have to face newly evolved zom­bies and new sur­vivors that come their way. 

For starters, I ab­solutely loved the first “Zom­bieland” when it was re­leased in 2009, as it was one of those hor­ror come­dies that I did­n’t think was go­ing to be good, and it turned out to be awe­some. But fans have been wait­ing for “Zom­bieland: Dou­ble Tap” to come true since the only thing that came close to a fol­low-up was a failed Ama­zon pi­lot that was not picked up. Now that di­rec­tor Ruben Fleis­cher is back af­ter helm­ing some pretty mediocre movies (“Venom”), orig­i­nal writ­ers Rhett Reese and Paul Wer­nick (“Dead­pool”) along with Dave Calla­ham and the orig­i­nal cast re­turns, this turned out to be an en­joy­able, fast-paced se­quel af­ter be­ing wor­ried about it. 

Like from be­fore, the per­for­mances from the cen­tral cast never dis­ap­point in the slight­est. All of them worked so well with each other, and it’s crazy they are more fa­mous now than they were back in 2009. Once again, Har­rel­son as Tal­la­has­see is just great. He just makes me smile every time he says some­thing funny, and the char­ac­ter is fun to watch over­all. But you also can’t for­get about Eisen­berg, Stone, and even Bres­lin, who are clearly hav­ing a great time com­ing back to this fran­chise. And you can see how all of them be­came this un­ex­pected fam­ily for over a decade and care for one other in terms of pro­tec­tion and hop­ing to still get along even in the good and bad times. 

Then you got a few new char­ac­ters for our char­ac­ters to join in the se­quel, in­clud­ing Rosario Daw­son as Nevada, Zoey Deutch as Madi­son, Luke Wil­son and Thomas Mid­dled­itch as Al­bu­querque and Flagstaff, who are pretty sim­i­lar to Tal­la­has­see and Colum­bus, and Avan Jo­gia as Berke­ley. The fun­ni­est char­ac­ter that stood out was Deutch since she’s play­ing the dumb blonde that’s ac­tu­ally sur­vived this long and she is noth­ing like the rest of the gang. I loved every scene she’s in. 

Since this is a com­edy se­quel, one would ex­pect the jokes to not be as funny from be­fore. How­ever, there were some con­sis­tent laughs through­out. Noth­ing was mak­ing me laugh-out-loud, but I was sur­prised that all the char­ac­ters had some­thing hi­lar­i­ous to say. 

Want your mo­ments of zom­bies get­ting checked off? Have at it. I have to say the ac­tion se­quences were cool when it needs to have any of the char­ac­ters fight­ing off zom­bies in cre­ative and slick fash­ion. There should­n’t be any shock­ing sur­prise to see how they are taken out. Aside from a few new zom­bies that were men­tioned be­fore, there are some new rules Colum­bus brought up when you’re in Zom­bieland and they pop up on the screen just like in the orig­i­nal. Those are help­ful re­minders one day when the apoc­a­lypse hap­pens. 

As for prob­lems, the story was pretty ba­sic be­cause there were not a lot of new things brought to this fic­tional world and there were not a ton of big sur­prises. Just a sim­ple plot of the char­ac­ters’ pit stops and killing zom­bies. Not every joke landed. Some of them, I felt, were a lit­tle bit dated for my taste. 

I was­n’t walk­ing into “Zom­bieland: Dou­ble Tap” as­sum­ing this was go­ing to be great, but it still ends up be­ing a fun ride, and I was sur­prised that this worked. It is hi­lar­i­ous, has plenty of cool zom­bie ac­tion and it still re­tains the chem­istry from its main cast. If you are like me and love the orig­i­nal, there is no prob­lem en­joy­ing this long-awaited se­quel. Who knows if a third in­stall­ment will ever be talked about? It would be nice to see these char­ac­ters go for an­other round. 

Grade: B