The Crazies (2010)

I really love zombie-esque movies, even though very few of them are that good. Still, I keep trying; that's why I rented "The Crazies" remake. I had a fun time watching it while Facebooking about it. There's really a whole subset of TV and movies that have been made much better by my screwing around on the Internet, so this review might be more positive towards the movie then it deserves, but, oh well! Movies and art are subjective anyway!

Timothy Olyphant does an awesome job playing a small-town sheriff who balances just the right mix of bad-assery and normal guy-ishness, which is really nice to see. He quickly figures out that something's not right in the town when a rash of violent crimes occurs and tracks down the source of the epidemic to a crashed cargo plane. Soon the government arrives and its a matter of Tim breaking quarantine to save his wife, restrained due to possible contamination. The rest of the movie plays out like a pretty straightforward run from the "zombies" while dodging the government and slowly figuring out that there's no one to trust!

However, inbetween the straightforwardness are a LOT of really excellent scenes. Though you may have seen the car wash scene in the trailer, it's actually much cooler when the whole set piece is played out (and don't move your eyes until the excellent coda finishes) in context with the screaming nurse-friend, the kick-ass sheriff's wife (Rhada Mitchell), and the increasingly crazy deputy.


Additionally, many of the standard supporting characters (e.g., the deputy sidekick who may already be infected, the screaming nurse-friend) behave in non-cliched ways. For example, instead of turning on the protaganists when they begin to suspect him, the deputy actually tries to listen to reason. It's very sad to see someone realize that he's slowly going mad and having to try to make the best decisions he can to give his friends a fighting chance. And I'm shocked that more movies don't give their protaganists half a brain. Maybe in the 60's and 70's, heroes could spend more time dicking around with no clue that anything sinister is going on, but 30-40 years later I can't believe that the sheriff couldn't connect the dots with two weird crimes and a uniformed body in the swamp to figure out that something has contaminated the water. But Timothy Olyphant did! Thank you for allowing me to suspend some disbelief, "The Crazies".

So how do you rate a somewhat standard horror movie that takes some nice steps forward to freshen up the genre? I thought about an ok rating, but I had a nice time watching this film and was surprised that it did do a lot of non-standard things during its runtime. So, I'll be somewhat kind and bump up to a Really Good!