Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Silliness

Blame bad timing. Stuck in development hell for five years, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was released a week before fellow dev. hell project Deadpool. While the latter movie has smashed all records for an R-rated superhero flick, the former has yet to make back its modest $28 million budget and is considered a box-office bomb. But I’m calling it now: PPZ will find decent legs on video. While it came out at a time when audiences are suffering zombie fatigue, there’s more to like about this movie beyond the undead.

While I’m a fan of Seth Grahame-Smith (I loved Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and reviewed his third book Unholy Night for Dorkadia last year), I confess not having read his breakthrough mash-up of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. However, I have read Austen’s novel, and I was amused at how “faithfully” PPZ followed that book. In Austen’s novel, the Bennet sisters are searching for husbands so they won’t be turned out of their house when their father dies. The 1813 novel is a comedy of manners, as the girls bicker over which man they intend to marry. Grahame-Smith keeps most of the beats of Austin’s novel; he just changes the motivations. The opening credits sequence does a masterful job of setting up the world, where London is overrun by zombies and separated from the rest of England by a demilitarized zone called the In-Between. Mr. Darcy is an expert zombie killer, which explains away his gruff demeanor. Wickham’s intentions are murkier: why does he sympathize with the zombies so much?

Given the novel’s popularity, any new adaptation has a lot to live up to and much do something differently than either the previous 11 movie/tv adaptations or the 8 “looser” adaptations, which include both Bridget Jones’s Diary and this film. According to my wife (who has seen more of the films than i ever will), PPZ has one of the better casts of any previous adaptations. Mrs. Bennet has more of a gold-digger personality and isn’t as shrill as the matrons who usually play her. My favorite on-screen personality was Matt Smith (of Doctor Who fame), whose Parson Collins pranced around in each scene he was in, providing much-needed comic relief. The Bennet sisters were all fairly self-sufficient (owing at least in part to their martial-arts training), but that’s consistent with their personalities in the novel. While Coin Firth is a hard act to follow, dead-eyed Sam Riley plays the character with a gruff edge. The chemistry between him and Elizabeth Bennet (Lily James) is good, and their duel halfway through the movie is delightfully titilating.

Had this movie come out closer to the 2009 publication of the novel, it might have performed better. Since then, the tropes it trades in have become victims of their own success. PPZ was arguably the first novel in the mashup genre that now includes Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, Little Women and Werewolves and Android Karenina. Likewise, there’s a glut of zombie comedy films and TV shows, from iZombie to Life After Beth. Poor timing aside, PPZ deserves a look as one of the first plots to explore how proper British girls fought the undead in the 18th century. If Ethan Hawke can deliver Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech while wandering through a a Blockbuster, then there’s room for Lady Catherine de Bourgh to be an eyepatch-wearing badass. Modern adaptations of classics are always tricky to pull off, but oftentimes the most risky are the most rewarding. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies goes so far out on a limb you can barely see the tree, but it’s an ultimately rewarding film for those willing to check it out.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies tl;drs

Quick summary: The Bennet sisters need to find husbands. But what’s a girl of lower birth to do when there’s a zombie apocalypse going on and your father can only afford to train you in the deadly martial arts of China?

Too many writers? Too many script polishers is more like it, as development hell meant new directors and new writers every year or so.

Recommended if you like: Zombie romcoms, Colin Firth

Better than I expected? Inspired casting, including more than one Game of Thrones actor.

Worse than I hoped? Only 12 million at the box office? Was everyone asleep that weekend?

Verdict: Better than its box office take suggests.

Related Reading: Wiki article