^{Image: Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Abigail Breslin, and Emma Stone in Zombieland: Double Tap © [Source: IMDB]}

★★☆☆☆

The makeshift family we left off with last time, find a home for themselves and try their best to live a relatively normal life in a dysfunctional world. As that slowly falls apart they have to find a way to reconnect, literally and metaphorically.

_{Director: Ruben Fleischer. Starring: Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, Luke Wilson [15]}

In typical Zombieland fashion, the film opens up with Eisenberg’s narration. On the new state of equilibrium our characters find themselves in. A small oddball family, living it large in the White House. Each seems content on the surface but the women of this home are discontent and head for the hills following a proposal. This sparks the chain of events that draw our characters back into the zombie-infested world.

But the zombies themselves have evolved. However, our characters, have not. Both in plot and critique. The film is stagnated on what made the first Zombieland a ball. The rules that poked fun at other films that paid no attention to the realistic aspect of surviving (seatbelts!), the quipy back and forth between the larger than life characters and the touching bond between them that grows through the film. It’s all there but none of it feels earned this time around, Fleischer seems content to allow the characters to repeat the past. But he does change the dynamic of our narrative, this is no longer focused on a group surviving the undead. This is about a family, a dysfunctional one that for better or worse look out for each other.

The cast is great at hitting home runs when bringing comedic timing and fun to the parts, indulging in every scene they are able to bring some flavour to. Equally, some of the more interesting elements to the plot this time around, even though they are stolen from other zombie films, do add a lot of humour into the group we know and make for some fun action scenes that show off a lot of character. But this does display the somewhat phoned in directional/writing approach to the film, leaving the film you are left wanting and not in a good way. In an I felt that there could have been so much more dynamic to the narrative and plot to really bring strong character development and simply fun to what ended up being a fun but forgettable film.