Zombieland: Double Tap (2019)

“Zombieland: Double Tap” (2019) felt like it was supposed to have been released in 2012.

Let’s start with this problem: unless your movie was a cultural phenomenon (“StarWars,” “Avengers,” “Avatar”), then there’s no room for a 10-years-later sequel to include lines like “you know how I feel about...” 
Because no. I don’t.
I saw “ZombieLand” (2009) roughly a year after it came out, so whatever emotional/behavioral preferences anyone had then are gone with time, and any in-joke or reference material that can be pulled from the original is equally gone. 
Dialogue like that came up multiple times during the first two acts, and all of them left me wondering “was that something I should have remembered?”
I shouldn’t have to watch the first movie right before starting the sequel to understand all the jokes.

Anyway.
“Z:TD” returned to us lead characters Tallahassee (Woody Harelson), Columbus (Jessie Eisenberg), Wichita (Emma Stone), and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin).
We also got to meet newcomers Madison (Zoey Deutch), Nevada (Rosario Dawson), Albuquerque (Luke Wilson) and Flagstaff (Thomas Middleditch). 
I’m sure there was some explanation in the first movie about why everyone had the name of an American locale, but the reason escapes me and ultimately wasn’t important, even the first time around.
So they’re in a zombie-apocalypse version of ‘now’ where rag-tag groups of people fend off the shambling masses for the luxury of driving whatever car they find and sleeping in whichever mansion looks most inviting and no one has PTSD from watching their loved ones become the walking dead.

Entertainingly, the movie was narrated by Columbus, as if he were documenting it for someone. Us, obviously, but that breaks the fourth wall too much so I’ll pretend it was his memoirs. 
A decade after the original adventure, the zombies had evolved... somehow. The original rotting hordes now had three identifiable breeds: Homers, Ninjas, Bolts, of which they were incredibly stupid, incredibly smart, and surprisingly durable, respectively.

While it seems that the Ninja strain would have made for a horrifying enemy to have to face down, the movie picked the Bolts, who were faster and stronger, to focus on. While two Bolts were shown to take an unreasonable amount of lead to kill, a large crowd of them ended up dying off through regular melee means, like any other zombie in any other media, so while that concept got built up in preparation for the climax, it ultimately had no payoff.

There was a hippie commune called “Babylon,” which was cutesy, but was the kind of thing that only could only exist because the production team wanted something impossibly stupid in their zombie-apocalypse world. The hippies were anti-gun and anti-violence, because they were hippies, which seems like a mindset that really shouldn’t have survived in a world where zombies outnumbered humans.

Tallahassee’s final plan did actually include a decent amount of forethought, but fell apart almost instantly because there wasn’t enough forethought. It only worked because of a Deus Ex Machina and the return of Nevada, who had no good reason to show up when and how she did. Sure, when Tallahassee left her and they kissed goodbye, it was easy to assume that they’d find their way back to each other by the finale, but her sudden reappearance was simply a plot device to keep the rest of the main characters from dying.

I did wish Little Rock died though. She was an annoying character who lent nothing to the story and just existed to give the plot a reason to happen. She absolutely should have been bitten. 

I want to take a moment to talk about a general problem with the apocalypse genre, be it aliens or zombies or super flu: None of the vehicles would still be working 10+ years later.
Sure, some of the car batteries or alternators or ignitions or whatever might still fire up, but the gasoline would have evaporated or water condensation would have gotten into  tanks and thus ruined any combustion engines. Unless people had the foresight to put stabilizer in their tanks when they thought the world was ending, then gas wouldn’t have even lasted six months. Which, notice, is a far cry from the 120+ months later that this movie took place in. It’s a trope, I know, but it’s stupid.
On the other hand, most media forgets to explain the continued existence of electricity too. At least Columbus bothered to make an offhand comment that the hydroelectric dams were still creating energy as the rivers continued to flow. I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t work a decade later, but at least they gave some kind of vague explanation, so I’ll give it a pass.

There were good things too, and I want to give them some attention.
The effects, both special and traditional, were outstanding. The zombies looked appropriately disgusting, and makeup make them look like they were indeed rotting away, day by day. Transcriptions of Columbus’s survival “rules” kept showing up in the air around him in a quirky form of kinetic typography that I kinda wish got used more in just about anything. When Flagstaff showed up and started relaying his “commandments,” those words dueled Columbus’s words for screen space. It was not overdone, so it didn’t get annoying.

Of course, it’s always fun to watch zombies get exploded, so that was a highlight too.

The music didn’t stand out in my mind, which also means it didn’t detract, so take that for what it’s worth.

This was an okay movie. Clearly I liked the first one enough that I gave the sequel a chance. It was a comedy, in that it never took itself too seriously and didn’t lose itself in the third act and become unreasonably serious or dark, but I don’t think I ever laughed at anything.
I saw it as a rental from the comfort of my couch, and I don’t feel bad about using my time at home to watch it, so I guess it earned itself a particularly apathetic 3-Claw rating.