Instead, the film follows the classic contours of a globe-trotting mystery, throwing in occasional set pieces of terror and mayhem. “World War Z,” which was directed by Marc Forster from a much-worked-over script by a large team of writers, doesn’t traffic in the kind of gratuitous gore for which zombie flicks are known and loved. With his dashing neck scarf and blond-highlighted hair worn just long enough to suggest rugged iconoclasm, Pitt portrays Gerry as the ideal reluctant hero, less a comic-book-style vanquisher of flesh-eating specters than a thoughtful, proficient problem solver, even when those problems can be solved only by swiftly cutting someone’s hand off.īut don’t worry: Even in that wince-inducing scene, the blood is kept safely off the screen. Soon Gerry is enlisted by a former colleague to help stop the epidemic, and with a virologist and Navy SEAL team in tow, he lands in South Korea, where the first known zombie infestation occurred. The most memorable sequence of “World War Z” occurs early in the film, when Gerry Lane (Pitt), his wife, Karin (Mireille Enos), and their two daughters are caught in a maelstrom in downtown Philadelphia, where a horde of blue-veined, palsied wraiths makes a gruesome hash of rush-hour traffic.
But it deserves a certain amount of credit for refusing to buy into the current cinematic arms race in Biggest, Loudest and Dumbest. investigator when a zombie apocalypse threatens to destroy the world, “World War Z” may not break new ground in either of the genres it straddles. Anchored by a solid lead performance by Brad Pitt, who plays a happy Philadelphia househusband pulled back into his old profession of U.N. Instead, be prepared for a relatively grown-up, modestly intelligent and refreshingly un-bombastic thriller that owes as much to medical tick-tocks such as “ Outbreak” and “ Contagion” as it does to “ 28 Days Later” and the seminal works of George Romero.
Forget those trailers suggesting a rock ’em, sock ’em, blow-it-all-up extravaganza or a Grand Guignol of cannibalistic grotesquerie by way of those titular Z’s i.e., face-eating zombies. Surprisingly entertaining, even fitfully exciting, “ World War Z” is primarily an exercise in expectation management.