The brand-new The Dead Don’t Die has many of the makings of a great arthouse comedy. It’s got a weary and rumpled Bill Murray. It takes on a played-out topic in ironic fashion, leaning into the genre’s tropes to comedic effect. Its director is Jim Jarmusch, who — make no mistake — has made some great films. This just doesn’t happen to be one of them.
In small-town Pennsylvania, Chief Cliff Robertson (Murray) and his two best-and-only officers (Adam Driver and Chloë Sevigny) attend to the strange events that occur as a result of polar fracking throwing the earth off its axis. Driver’s Officer Ronnie Peterson is meta as can be, not so much shattering the fourth wall as chipping away at it little by little. His character has a Star Destroyer keychain (get it?). He has knowledge of forthcoming plot points, because he’s literally read The Dead Don’t Die’s script. He’s aware that Sturgill Simpson’s titular tune is the film’s theme song.
Speaking of Simpson, the Nashvillian country songster is name-dropped no fewer than half a dozen times throughout the movie, and his “The Dead Don’t Die” plays about as often. It’s one of a few running gags that make the film likable in that irrepressible Jarmuschian way. There are also, of course, the endless cameos. Tom Waits’ woods-dwelling hermit is our Greek chorus of sorts, while we get our global news reports from Rosie Perez’s Posie Juarez. Iggy Pop is a coffee-craving zombie. Steve Buscemi is a racist farmer. Danny Glover is a kindhearted hardware-store owner. Wu-Tang’s RZA is a “Wu-PS” delivery man, and Selena Gomez is a “Cleveland hipster” passing through town. Tilda Swinton is a peculiar delight (though, truly, when is she not?) as a katana-wielding Scottish mortician.
But Swinton’s performance — perhaps a little too good for this picture — illustrates The Dead Don’t Die’s fatal flaw. These are really rich, quirky and funny characters, played by extraordinarily talented performers, many of them marquee names. But Jarmusch doesn’t leave them many places to go. By film’s end, the director has painted his leads into a dismal corner from which there is no escape. Is there a message here about corporate greed destroying the planet? No, at least not one we haven’t already heard plenty of times. Is there hope to be found somewhere, anywhere? No. Only meandering nothingness, an on-the-nose George A. Romero reference or two and some pretty excellent gore, though we’re an hour in before we get to see any of it.
It’s all enough to make you wonder why indie darling Jarmusch — whose last effort, 2016’s Paterson, received nearly universal acclaim — would take on such an overfished genre. True, he’s done it before successfully; 1995’s Dead Man is a Western unlike any other, funny and dark and featuring what is some of Johnny Depp’s best work. But The Dead Don’t Die doesn’t do anything new with the tropes it has reanimated. It doesn’t accomplish anything that the underrated Zombieland and the appropriately beloved Shaun of the Dead didn’t — both are better, more unique films, as funny as they are gruesome, but also worthwhile in their own singular ways.
Ultimately, Jarmusch’s ensemble zom-com is bloated with celebrity cameos, meta moments and enough left turns to keep it fun and vaguely surprising. But it just isn’t a particularly significant addition to either the American zombie canon or Jarmusch’s own catalog.
