The Dead Don't Die

“This is going to end badly.”

Truer words have never been uttered.

Adam Driver’s character Officer Ronnie Peterson is supposed to act as some sort of meta-oracle being, but his 4th wall antics accidentally end up forming a savage critique of the flick’s painfully blatant inadequacies. With every chime of “This is going to end badly” (and there are dozens), you will grow wearily aware that, yes, this film is going to end badly, very badly indeed and ever-so increasingly very badly with every passing second.

This was the kind of watch that made you ponder if you should take up being water-boarded as a more pleasant alternative. It’s a film that feels like a prank, like a punishment - the longer you watch, the more apparent it becomes that you are in fact on the losing side. You will have to (if you ever do drag yourself to watch this movie [and I really have no idea why you would]) engage in a continuous war against the disbelief that this tone-deaf, patronising, nostalgia dampened cringe-fest could ever have been vomited from the hilarious and ethereal mind that brought you indie classics such as Only Lovers Left Alive and Paterson.

The Dead Don’t Die was a putrid husk of a movie, gradually collapsing under the insufferable weight of its own mediocrity. Watching Jim Jarmusch’s loop of garish pulp horror in-jokes and sardonic quips started out as a vaguely entertaining (the Tom Waits ‘Hermit Bob’ scenes go a long way to redeem the film) if utterly unoriginal romp, but gradually the wan humour gives way to endless repetition the wan humour gives way to endless repetition the wan humour gives way to endless repetition which puts you in mind of an uncle recounting the same anecdote over and over until they have successful robbed it of all life and joy.

With its character development barely scratching the surface, the whole affair felt like a diet The Evil Dead, a version bleached of all the cinematic goodness of Sam Raimi’s cheesy dialogue, practical effects or jump starts, until you are left stuffed with the hollow calories of a superficial yarn that has all the worst parts of David Lynch’s slow-burn suburban uncanniness. As the credits roll, despite the best efforts of a drop-dead fabulous, extensive and expensive cast (Bill Murray, Steve Buscemi, Iggy Pop and Tilda Swinton to name-drop but a few), you will be left with the same sick emptiness that is roughly the emotional equivalent of the feeling you get after binging several fast-food burgers in quick succession.

You would be forgiven for thinking that large swathes of Jarmusch’s latest instalment were destroyed in a fire and that his studio was given all of two hours to piece the mismatched and singed articles back into some semblance of a cohesive narrative. Parts are so painfully try-hard that you will scarcely be able to confront them through the cracks between your fingers, whilst elsewhere there’s an unhealthy smattering of amateur-style Adobe after-effects and several slow-mo sequences that would feel trite and jarring even in a Tarantino epic. Then there are dashes of ecological doomsday, portions of cack-handed critique on capitalist consumerist culture (picture a B-movie Dawn of the Dead) a sprinkle of unnecessary alien invasions and an almost apologetic undertone of existential angst. It was as if Jarmusch reached a creative impasse whereby he’d accidentally generated 5 scripts each with utterly disparate tones and endings and, rather than heading back to the drawing board like any other sane human being, decided he would commit himself to all of them at once; audience and artistic integrity be damned.

I would like to make an apology. In my preview for the June-July issue, I recommended this alternative zom-com splatter-fest as the one to look out for this summer. How wrong could I have been? This is the one to look away from this summer. True, I was taken in by the trailer (as you might be too) which laid claim to almost every funny or memorable aspect of this movie, but you are not to be fooled as I was and should stay well clear of this agonisingly unoriginal carnage and save yourself from total, numb, melancholic disappointment by giving this carcass of a movie a significantly wide berth.

2/10