Pride and Prejudice and Zombies Review

You might imagine that I get asked in conversation for my opinion on this film with some regularity. I do. Actually, I most often get asked first whether I watched it, and usually the person asking cringes a little as if they might have given offence even by suggesting that I might do such a thing. But fear not! I am quite open to satire and mash-ups. In fact, the entirety of my opinion is premised on my love of the video below. I recommend you watch it with sound before reading the rest of my review, that is, if you have not watched it before.

The summary of my thoughts on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is that I wish it had been made by the brilliant amateurs who made that YouTube video! The whole film ought to have been a series of camp jokes about how difficult it is to wash brains out of a petticoat. It should have been one long, hilarious juxtaposition of strict propriety and gory violence. It should have thrown out any pretense of actually being Pride and Prejudice, aside from character names and very few plot points. Instead, it tried to fit the entirety of the novel, PLUS a whole zombie film into 90 minutes! So it neither delivered as a Jane Austen diversion, nor as a zombie movie, because they cancelled each other out instead of playing off each other. It would have been so much better if the girls from the Fight Club had been given free range to script some good quips and string them together into the semblance of a narrative. I mean, imagine what they could have achieved with a budget one tenth the size of what was spent on the Zombie apocalypse and Lily James.

I wanted more of this kind of thing - fussing about their hair and their dresses, and also whether their daggers make their bums look big... (they didn't actually make that joke, but I wish they had)

Actually, I have no issue with Lily James. I think she is all right. Her mouth kind of reminds of my irresistable friend Poppy and so I sort of find her cute, and liked her much more with dark hair, actually. The only casting error I felt was Mr. Darcy. He ought to have been MUCH better looking! I mean, he ought to have been Benedict Cumberbatch regardless of how old he is. He was born to play Darcy, in my opinion. But even without the Batch, they should have found someone more action hero, if he is supposed to be this zombie-slaying stud, basically.

In a nutshell, that is my opinion. I'm not a snob. I was somewhat looking forward to a good laugh, but it wasn't funny enough. There were a few clever moments, but on the whole, it was just kind of gross.