The Dead Don't Die

When I first saw the trailer for The Dead Don't Die I couldn't wait to see it because a movie featuring Adam Driver chasing zombies sounded completely awesome (I find Adam Driver to be strangely appealing).  I finally had the chance to see it yesterday.  It is pretty out there but (and I don't know what this says about me) I kind of dug it!  The Earth has been knocked off its axis because of polar fracking and, while representatives of the polar fracking industry are heard repeatedly on the radio and TV asserting that it is not harmful to the environment, things are definitely amiss in the sleepy town of Centerville.  Daylight lasts longer than normal, cell phone reception is lost, animals hide, and corpses reanimate and gravitate to the things they did while alive.  These zombies begin to kill the weirdly idiosyncratic citizens leaving Police Chief Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray), Officer Ronnie Peterson (Driver), and Officer Minerva "Mindy" Morrison (Chloe Sevigny) to protect the town with a little help from Zelda Winston (Tilda Swinton), a Scottish undertaker with the skills of a ninja.  As Ronnie repeatedly warns us, this is not going to end well!  The cast is worthy of any Wes Anderson movie and includes Steve Buscemi, Danny Glover, Caleb Landry Jones, Carol Kane, and Danny Fassenden as townspeople;  Iggy Pop and Sara Driver as zombies;  Selena Gomez, Austin Butler, and Luka Sabbat as the hipsters from Cleveland;  and Tom Waits as a hermit watching and providing commentary from the edge of the woods.  The humor is incredibly dry and subtle but the message that we are all zombies heading towards our own destruction is anything but.  I laughed out loud many, many times (I have a strange sense of humor) but I did feel that the ending was a bit heavy handed.  I loved the chemistry between Murray and Driver and the movie is at its best when the two of them are bantering back and forth with the deadpan delivery that is a hallmark of a Jim Jarmusch movie.  Murray can deliver any line and make me laugh and Driver is fully committed to the absurdity.  I also loved the meta awareness where the characters periodically act as if they know they are in a movie.  A joke involving the theme song by Sturgill Simpson is particularly amusing and the Star Wars reference just about killed me!  This is definitely not going to appeal to everyone but, if you are a fan of Jarmusch's other movies (I love Broken Flowers), you might enjoy it as much as I did.