Reviews

I was hyped for this movie, as I read a lot of good reviews about it, specifically about Adam Sandlers performance. I had previously liked him in Punch-Drunk Love, and he does give a good performance here. It is competently put together, BUT not at all enjoyable to watch (for me personally). There you have this guy, who is hustling the entire movie, with some unpleasant people after him, just so he can get shot, right as he gets the money.

Watching this movie was a very stressful, and ultimately pointless experience.

P.S. I thought, the score did not fit the movie well.

I went to see it with my wife, and we both quite enjoyed it. While it is not as good as the first Zombieland, it is still a lot of fun. The addition of the ditsy blonde Madison (Zoey Deutch) to the cast was a highlight for me. My wife was found her to be annoying at first, but eventually warmed up to her.

Our biggest dissapointment was, that none of the hippies at the Babylon commune got eaten by zombies. That would have been a truly satisfactory sight, that the movie chose withhold from us. A small consolation is, that in the event of an actual apocalypse, these people would be among the first to get killed.

In any case, we did not regret paying the price for a ticket, and had plenty of fun.

I just finished X+Y and I gotta say, I rather enjoyed it, even though it is quite clichéd and predictable to the point where "you can plot the vectors of the narrative from the angles of the opening moves" (Kermode), yet it still managed to capture me, because it never went too overboard into becoming sappy and mockishly sentimental, and because I'm a big sucker for these kind of stories. The performances were really good all around and I agree with LostMartian here; I also especially liked the performance of Jake Davies (Luke; dead parrot) who gave a particularly touching performance.

But enough of that. I wanna get into the clichés (particularly those the movie successfully avoided) a bit. This is where we go into spoiler territory.

So, throughout the first act of the movie, I think to myself: I'm really liking this, but it is setting up all those clichéd story lines, that'll make it become a Disney Channel movie. I know this may sound a little paradox. The best example I can think of here is the movie Saved! with Jena Malone, Mandy Moore and Macaulay Culkin, enjoyable and kinda clever for the most part, but completely ruined by the third act. Well, this movie avoids that for the most part.

So, here are some of the things this movie successfully avoided:

1. Richard (Eddie Marsan) talks to Nathan (Asa Butterfield) about how Nathans mentor Mr. Humphreys didn't lose the IMO just because of his illness, as he was told before. Perfect set-up for a sappy dramatic liar-revealed moment. AVOIDED, thank god

2. Isaac (the sort-of bully) becoming cartoonishly evil in the third act by doing something completely unethical to advance his chances of winning. AVOIDED, thank god It would not have made sense anyway in the way this competition was set up, but that hasn't stopped other movies from doing it anyway.

3. When Nathan and his mother decided to chase after Zhang Mei, I was half expecting an airport chase a la Love Actually, but then it just showed the bonding moment between him and his mother in the car, and then directly him on the train with Zhang Mei, so AVOIDED although I wouldn't have mind the grand airport chase, but I'm still glad it didn't go for that.

Apart from that, the movie did tap into many clichés (the outcast,rough- around-the-edges wise cracking mentor Mr. Humphreys, the relationship between Mr. Humphreys and Nathans mother, the dramatic climax during the IMO and so on and so forth), but the movie still managed to bring these things across in a more understated manner than most of the competition, and it managed to stay content and intimate overall.