Mutants |
 View Movie
 • France • 2009 • 95m •   • Directed by: David Morlet. • Starring: Hélène de Fougerolles, Francis Renaud, Dida Diafat, Marie-Sohna Condé, Nicolas Briançon, Luz Mandon, Driss Ramdi, Grégory Givernaud, Justine Bruneau, Jérémy Loth, Sébastien Rouquette, Frédéric Troussier, Cyril Hipaux..      In the middle of a zombie apocalypse, a resourceful couple hides out in an isolated abandoned building. The woman is pregnant and the man is infected, slowly transforming into the kind of inhuman monster they are trying to escape.
|
Trailers:
| Length: | Languages: | Subtitles: |
Review:
We've all grown accustomed to French movies lacking logic and credibility; they've been that way ever since French cinema's inception. Where the movie succeeds is visual realism; other than that, forget about it. If one day the French learn to add intelligence and sense to their slick directorialvisual style, they will make the best movies in the world. But until that happens, they will keep churning out a very mixed bag of filmic debris.
The first criticism: rather than give us slow, dull-witted -' i.e. traditional - zombies, we get an army of fast-moving killing-machines, each zombie as versed in hand-to-hand combat as a Green Beret. In such a world, there wouldn't be any human survivors at all. Imagine a handful of humans fighting against millions of Green Berets who never tire, and who kill efficiently and at any opportunity. That's the premise here, and it's too stupid even for a dumb little zombie flick. I am surprised that the main characters lasted a minute, let alone a few days or weeks. This new and annoying trend of speedy zombies started in 2004's "Dawn of the Dead" has got to stop. God forbid Spielberg should start making zombie movies, because then they'd be intelligent as well as fast (hints: "Jurassic Park" and "Jaws"). A big part of the zombie "charm" is their stupidity and physical ineptness. Take away those two things and they become just like regular human psychos, and that's pointless and dull.
Which brings me to the main criticism: in a speed-runner zombie-athlete apocalypse, the few human survivors would be forced to BAND TOGETHER. On the contrary, in this zombie flick most humans are as deadly to each other as the zombies are to them. Dunno, perhaps it's a French thing, this egotistic, everyone-for-themselves mentality, but it's not an approach that would get the (French) population very far -' for very long - in a post-apocalyptic speedy-zombie environment. In reality, a threat as extreme as record-breaking 100-meter-sprint zombies would force all remaining humans to swiftly unite. The people least likely to survive in such a scenario are precisely the kind of sociopathic characters that infest this dumb movie; a sociopath is unable to function within a group, but collective effort and mutual support would certainly be the only path to survival. So why do we have so many sociopaths here as remnants of humanity? Perhaps all of France is that way, dunno. Or the script is stupid: that's possible also.
A white couple is held HOSTAGE (?!) by a uniformed black woman with a deep voice. They are absurdly ambushed by an autistic kid at a gas station. How the hell a mentally-challenged kid gets to survive while everyone else succumbs to the zombie invasion is anybody's guess. Idiotically enough, the white woman insists on bringing along this dangerous autistic fella (who attacks people and zombies alike, randomly), the result of which is a heated argument with their black female captor, and an ensuing battle results in the white woman's beau getting both shot -' and infected. Yet it is HE who keeps apologizing to HER throughout the next (rather tedious) half-hour for becoming a zombie, instead of blaming her for bringing them in that predicament with her totally unreasonable request to bring along the highly unstable autistic teen.
Eventually, a stereotypical French-movie gang of psychos predictably shows up, headed by a leader straight out of French Cinema's Guide For Overacting Your Butt Off In The Role Of A Bad Guy. The fact he looks like Phillip Kohlschreiber doesn't exactly help matters either. Worse yet, this supposedly tough-as-nails band of criminal misfits fail abysmally in their first crisis, and very easily get taken out by the Green Beret Olympic athletes. I mean the zombies.
When all is said and done, it's once again style over substance -' the age-old French movie problem.
And frcrissakes, next time don't make it so easy for zombies to kill the humans: that reduces the tension, rather than increasing it. Sometimes less is more.
Review by fedor8 from the Internet Movie Database.
Conventions & Events
Latest Teasers
Latest Trailers
Latest TV Spots