All Along the Watchtower.
Dead Rising: Watchtower (2015): 6 out of 10: Reporter Chase Carter (Jesse Metcalfe) is covering life inside a zombie quarantine zone when the medication keeping the infected population reasonably human stops doing its job. Suddenly, getting the story becomes considerably less important than avoiding becoming part of somebody’s digestive system. Chase joins forces with resourceful survivor Crystal (Meghan Ory) and grieving mother Maggie (Virginia Madsen) to find a way out.
Unfortunately, the authorities outside the perimeter have their own priorities, while the people inside include a biker gang whose enthusiasm for the situation suggests they were not especially pleasant before the apocalypse. Survival will require ingenuity, cooperation, and enough duct tape to qualify for a contractor’s discount.
The Good
The Good: Dead Rising: Watchtower is much, much better than it has any right to be. For starters, it is a video game adaptation. I do not think I am telling tales out of school when I suggest those can represent some of the worst entertainment Hollywood has to offer. Or direct-to-video Hollywood. Or the Canadian branch of direct-to-video Hollywood. Add the fact that it is also a zombie movie, and we have two strikes before anyone picks up a garden implement.
Yet somebody involved understood the assignment. This is a movie that properly uses the source material provided by Dead Rising.
The improvised weapons are here. The duct tape is here. The perfectly innocent household equipment being repurposed into something that would invalidate the warranty is here. More importantly, these things emerge naturally from the action. People need weapons, people find materials, and people put those materials together. The movie captures the appeal of the games without constantly stopping to congratulate you for recognizing something.
It also remembers the psychos. One of the defining features of Dead Rising is that the zombies are often less troublesome than the surviving humans, particularly the ones who have embraced societal collapse as a professional opportunity. We get a wonderfully disturbing clown and an especially effective biker leader played by Aleks Paunovic, who gives my favorite performance in the film. He understands exactly how much personality this sort of villain needs without turning every appearance into an audition for a different movie.
Most of the cast does respectable work. There are plenty of those actors you recognize from that thing you watched but could not name if your continued survival depended on it. Nobody needs to clear space for an Oscar. There is, however, charisma on the screen, and people generally sell what they have been asked to sell. In a movie like this, that counts for quite a bit.
The zombie action is entertaining, too. The bikers set traps, amuse themselves with the undead, and generally behave like people who have discovered that the end of the world comes with recreational possibilities. I would have preferred more practical gore effects, which regular readers can probably have engraved on my tombstone, but the digital blood bothered me less than usual here.
For disclosure, I watched the unrated DVD, which even comes with a director’s commentary. This is an odd production in that it clearly has some money behind it while retaining the unmistakable personality of a movie you discover on a shelf and buy because the cover promises questionable decisions.
And yes, I am an easy mark for this material. I like the Resident Evil movies. Their relationship with the games is often more of a distant acquaintance, but they generally entertain me, and I love Milla Jovovich. My requirements are not unreasonable. Give me attractive people, entertaining monsters, and a reason to remain awake.
Watchtower mostly obliges.
And the best Zombie in a Zombie movie goes to…
There is, however, one genuinely WTF moment that deserves considerable praise. For perhaps ten seconds, we see a zombie wearing one of those baby carriers strapped to its chest. It is eating the baby’s head.
My girlfriend audibly gasped. I said, “Holy shit.”
We never see that zombie again. Somebody conceived a zombie that is genuinely disturbing. Whoever came up with it earned a special prize. I am not sure what the prize should be, mind you. Maybe one of those chainsaws on a stick they sell as tree trimmers in infomercials.
The Bad
The Bad: Before discussing what the film gets wrong, let us appreciate something it wisely leaves out: that effing timer.
I spent somewhere between sixteen and twenty hours with the original Dead Rising game. Those were enjoyable hours. They were also deeply frustrating hours. The zombies, improvised weapons, and murderous lunatics provided the ingredients for one of the best games of its decade. Unfortunately, the game also wanted me to maintain a schedule.
You could be on the wrong side of the mall, miss something important, and discover that your attempt at a perfect run had become an elaborate waste of an afternoon. The structure encouraged repeated attempts, while my instincts encouraged restarting and trying to do everything correctly. These two approaches did not produce a harmonious relationship. Fighting a ridiculously difficult boss is one thing. Fighting him while worrying about an appointment on the other side of a shopping center is another. I already have a job.
The film frees us from that particular frustration, then finds a cinematic equivalent by repeatedly interrupting the fun.
The government conspiracy is the lesser offender, although it consumes a remarkable amount of oxygen. We have the military, the emergency authorities, suspicious medication, and a tracking scheme involving microchips. You know people carry phones, right? Most of them voluntarily update the world on their location, lunch, and relationship status. Surely there is a less elaborate way to keep tabs on somebody than whatever this is.
The entire business has the feel of a conspiracy plot left over from the nineties. Watching it after the pandemic also changes the flavor of the sinister government and faulty treatment storyline. I understand what the movie is doing. I just do not particularly care, and I am slightly surprised the characters have so much enthusiasm for investigating it while people are trying to eat them.
There is also a deception involving a warehouse rescue that becomes less sensible the more you consider what the general (an excellent Dennis Haysbert) knows and what he wants. Without spoiling the details, his own interests appear to favor a much more direct response. Send in troops, deal with what is inside, and decide how successful the rescue needs to be. This is not a film-destroying plot hole. It is a head-scratcher in a movie long enough to give you time to scratch.
A simpler story about escaping the quarantine zone would have been perfectly sufficient. Let the larger situation emerge through occasional dialogue and environmental storytelling.
Virginia Madsen presents a different sort of mismatch. Her grieving mother is withdrawn, traumatized, and operating on an emotional wavelength noticeably separate from the surrounding mayhem. Her scenes are not bad by any means. Her performance is fine. She simply seems to have arrived from a more serious film, and I do not think the material plucks the heartstrings quite as effectively as the filmmakers hoped.
There are tone issues all over the place. Despite baby carrier zombie (and in fairness the fate of Virginia Madsen and her daughter), Dead Rising: Watchtower has an occasional reluctance to follow through on its nastier possibilities. Dead Rising: Watchtower keeps introducing these possibilities only to hand wave them away later. In particular, threatened sexual violence feels less dangerous than intended because the film has established a habit of giving us a plausible set-up and then going just kidding in the next scene. The biker gang in paticular seems nerfed in this manner.
I am not stating I demand rape in my Zombie/video game adaptation. I am suggesting in a movie where people eat babies, perhaps not continue to introduce that particular threat of sexual assault in the first place on at least two occasions.
The Ugly
The Ugly: Rob Riggle as Frank West. I remember Frank West. I like Frank West. The cynical photojournalist was a large part of the original game’s appeal. Capcom even built Dead Rising 2: Off the Record around putting him into a reimagined version of the second game’s outbreak. There is a reason people wanted more of this character.
I do not know what the hell Riggle thought he was playing. Well, that is not entirely fair. He was playing obnoxious comic relief. I recognized the intention. The comedy was harder to locate.
Frank appears on television with a news anchor, and the movie keeps cutting back to their exchanges as though somebody has discovered an inexhaustible supply of entertainment. Frank swears, dispenses dubious over-the-top advice, and generally behaves like a man whose continued presence in the studio should concern security. His advice about children killing their grandmothers first is among the better material. That should give you an idea of the problem.
Eventually, the anchor seems as unimpressed with him as I am. Unfortunately, the film making fun of its irritating character does not make that character less irritating.
An occasional television interlude could provide a useful change of pace. Repeated visits turn into “comedy” sketches interrupting a thriller that already runs longer than it needs to. Just as the action develops some momentum, we return to Frank so he can drain all the excitement and tension out of the film.
I would describe this performance as more Duke Nukem than Frank West, but Duke Nukem is funnier. Even in Duke Nukem Forever. And that is saying something.
Protip: undercutting your own film to make snarky unfunny asides makes viewing the same tedious and takes away from the good work you are doing. Never go full Taika Waititi.
In Conclusion
In Conclusion: Dead Rising: Watchtower understands enough of its source material to deliver an entertaining adaptation. The improvised weapons work, the psychos work, the zombie action mostly works, and the cast supplies more personality than this sort of production necessarily guarantees. Paunovic is a particular asset, and one fleeting background atrocity will remain with me considerably longer than the conspiracy.
Cut back the government intrigue and drastically reduce the Frank West television segments, and there is a leaner, better movie here. As it stands, the decent material survives some unnecessary interference. A fun if occasionally frustrating movie.
