Jim Jarmusch fails to breathe life into 'The Dead Don't Die' zombie comedy
“The Dead Don't Die” - ★ ½
In Jim Jarmusch's zombie comedy “The Dead Don't Die,” Adam Driver and Bill Murray play Ronnie and Cliff, a pair of amiable police officers in a small town called Centerville — a rural, pleasant redoubt that when the movie opens is seen behind a scrim of gentle mist. “A Real Nice Place,” reads a welcome sign later in the film, which of course can only mean that it's not going to stay that way.
Ronnie and Cliff are on their way to see Hermit Bob, the prime suspect in a local crime spree. “Don't break any more laws,” Cliff says in his measured, easygoing tone. That low-key equanimity is completely in Murray's wheelhouse, but it won't do much good when Centerville starts to go kerblooey, first with some strange solar phenomenon and finally with the arrival of staggering, staring, intestine-eating wraiths.
Does the chaos that engulfs Centerville have something to do with the strange new undertaker Zelda (Tilda Swinton)? Is it brought on by a horror movie aficionado named Bobby (Caleb Landry Jones)? Has a boom in polar fracking tipped the Earth off its axis? Or, as Ronnie and Cliff's earnest colleague Mindy (Chloë Sevigny) says, is the world just “kind of strange lately?”
“The Dead Don't Die” is animated by the same mordant humor that has become Jarmusch's trademark since making his debut a generation ago. Indeed, the entire opening credit sequence reads like an honor roll of downtown New York street cred. Such venerated elders as Tom Waits, Steve Buscemi and Iggy Pop play supporting roles, along with relative youngsters like Selena Gomez. Jarmusch lards his script with self-referential nods that reward viewers heavily invested in their own cool, in-on-it knowingness. And sure, the callbacks and inside jokes bounce along charmingly at first. But the banter eventually becomes stifling, as claustrophobic and oppressive as Centerville itself.
When Jarmusch made a vampire movie — the exquisite 2013 film “Only Lovers Left Alive” — he turned it into an elegant, elegiac comment on dependency, urban decay and rebirth. Here, his organizing principles are much fuzzier. As things get weirder in “The Dead Don't Die,” that's all they do: get weirder (and gorier), but not sharper or more illuminating.
The absurdism wears gratingly thin in “The Dead Don't Die,” whose deadpan tone gives way to tiresome, grindingly repetitive inertia. Jarmusch might be seeking to preempt criticism when he has a character bemoan hipsters “and their irony,” but that's precisely the kind of winking meta-commentary that winds up deep-sixing his own film.
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Starring: Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, Chloë Sevigny, Caleb Landry Jones
Directed by: Jim Jarmusch
Other: A Focus Features release. Rated R for violence and language. 104 minutes