'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies' - Movie Review

There was a sort of inevitability about it once the book was written: the world has an ongoing fascination with Jane Austen and - quite separately - with zombies, so doing a full production of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (by Seth Grahame-Smith, 2009) kind of had to happen. Not that that's necessarily a good thing.

The roles are filled with young and mostly unknown actors, who are gamely attempting to take this ridiculous premise seriously. Lily James (lovely and almost as untalented as ever, although she may be improving) is Elizabeth Bennet. Sam Riley - who has the voice of John Hurt at its most spectacularly gravelly - plays Fitzwilliam Darcy. Jack Huston is Mr. Wickham, Bella Heathcote is Jane Bennet, and Charles Dance is the father who has ensured all five of his daughters are trained in the art of war. There's bloodshed and betrayal and dialogue that no fan of Austen would ever mistake for her prose. Things turn out vaguely P&P-ish, but it ain't Austen and it isn't much of a zombie movie either.

Being a zombie movie, you really should approach it without a brain. People become zombies by infection caused by a bite. Zombies attack people because they want to eat their brains. You kill a zombie by crushing its skull (implied: to destroy the brain). So how do zombies multiply? Via unsuccessful attacks. Wait, what? If the attack was successful, you wouldn't have another zombie because the attacker would have eaten the victim's brains - leaving a corpse with a destroyed brain that couldn't become a zombie.

Not to mention the whole thing that bitten people retain intelligence so long as they don't eat human brains (even pig brains are okay). Most of them know this, so why wouldn't they resist, and stay smart?

So yeah, if you're not already a brainless zombie, don't watch this. I mean, it's not even funny.