I'll say a few things right off the bat. I loved this movie. I loved Seth Grahame-Smith's book. I love mashing genres together. I love the cheeky, naughty, silly awesomeness of this kind of artwork. I'm not a fan of much comedy in general, but this is exactly the sort of sassy, irreverent humor I crave. It's why I play few video games other than the Lego actions games of popular franchises. It's why I loved Cowboys and Aliens. It's why I'm crazy about Grahame-Smith's other books.
For those of you who may not know, or are too lazy to guess, the film is essentially (very essentially) the plot of Jane Austen's classic romance with the added element of brain-eating zombies taking over 19th-century England. That's it. Very simple. From what I've read and heard, a lot of viewers felt let down by the movie because it's not as high-brow as they were expecting. To be fair, the book is a conceptual coup, with Grahame-Smith pirating large sections of Austen's work (never fear, she is credited with co-authorship), mimicking her style in others, and wholly inventing new horror in still more. The film, by nature as a film, can't do the same; what it does do is take the concept and adapt it to a more or less straightforward action/horror film while retaining the romance, drama, and vicious wordplay of Austen's classic.
Much like the recent adaptation of another Grahame-Smith book -- Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter -- this film takes great liberties with the source material. Though this one is directed by Burr Steers (17 Again, Igby Goes Down) and not Tim Burton, it's still a notably more Gothic vision than I expected, littered with bodies and smeared in gore. A leather-clad and moody Darcy, played by Sam Riley pretending to be Hugh Jackman a la Van Helsing (2004), leads the battle against the undead, while the silly, corseted Bennet sisters avoid their mother's schemes to marry them off. When newcomer Mr. Bingley (the handsome Douglas Booth) throws a ball and zombies invade the kitchens, the sisters seize the moment to show the villagers their fearsome prowess as masters of the sword.
Not long after, we begin to see that the sisters -- actually, pretty much just Elizabeth -- is no less a master of propriety and conversation than with a blade. In perhaps the most effective scenes of the film, the direct confrontations between Darcy and Liz and later Lady Catherine and Liz, our young hero thrusts and parries both her body and her words in fearsome combat that is at once outrageously funny and terrifyingly violent. Bravo to Lily James (Downton Abbey, Cinderella) for mastering the material. The other two perfectly cast actors, to my mind, would be Charles Dance as the Gothic version of Mr. Bennet, and Matt Smith, as the silly and stupid Mr. Collins (though, regrettably, his end in the film is nothing like in the novel, a scene I was particularly anticipating).
The film begins to falter, however, when it tries to make larger departures from the source material and, in doing, takes itself far too seriously. The siege of London, the escape over the bridge, the fairytale ending, and the weird mid-credits wannabe cliffhanger all point to a design that seeks to fashion a blockbuster franchise. The filmmakers should have left well enough alone and made the film the material deserves. For the most part they did, but it's in those final scenes that they were obviously trying too hard and grasping for handholds beyond their reach.
But, then, the film itself says, "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains."
IMDb: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
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