Pride and Prejudice and Zombies review – when the undead are dead boring

Early in Pride and Prejudice Mr Darcy offers his opinion of Elizabeth Bennet to Mr Bingley: “She is tolerable.” Would that I could say the same about this stupid film. Representing the lowest form of mashup, Burr Steers’ ridiculous adaptation is, to be fair, a fascinating example of an idiotic culture gone horribly wrong.

I have not read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (the “Quirk Book classic”, as it is described in the credits) for two reasons. One, life is finite, and two, if I simply had to dig into Seth Grahame-Smith’s oeuvre, I’d choose Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. It has to be said that the first two-thirds of Steers’ film has stretches that aren’t too bad. That’s because it is a fairly standard, albeit cheapo version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Granted, Lily James and Sam Riley are no Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier or even Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen, but for much of the time they are recognisably Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy. But then they are fighting zombies, for some reason.

At the beginning it is amusing to try and predict how brain-eating monsters will be inserted into the story. Example: Jane Bennet still rides by horseback and not by coach to visit Mr Bingley, and gets a cold from the rain. Only this time, during the trip, she also runs foul of some not-too-gory undead denizens. But this gets less and less amusing as time goes on.

A storybook opening outlines the history of the Georgian period mixed with Halloween horrors, and there’s something about wealthy children being educated in the Far East so that they can learn how to defend themselves against the zombie hordes. This might be a cynical attempt to appeal to the Asian market, but it does explain why these corseted girls know kung fu.

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When we first meet the Bennet sisters, they are sharpening swords and cleaning muskets. One nifty slow motion shot head-fakes toward Paul WS Anderson-style garters-and-stockings-and-scabbards, but there’s not as much Merchant-Ivory meets Frederick’s of Hollywood as you might expect. Even with Lena Headey as an eyepatch-wearing Lady Catherine, the movie plays most of its zombie apocalypse pretty straight. Matt Smith is hilarious as the dopey pastor/cousin Mr Collins, but that’s because his story arc has hardly any zombies in it.

I like plenty of zombie movies, but given the low budget and the force-fed nature of the gimmick, the third act, which splits into an original story for long sequences, is a bore. A scene at the end in which Lizzie and Mr Darcy trade romantic quips as they chop up corpses was no doubt pitched to executives as just “so epic and crazy”. By this point in the movie the reanimated corpses aren’t subversive: they’re just dead.