It’s a little bit bizarre seeing legendary action hero
Arnold Schwarzenegger scale back his larger-than-life acting persona. Known primarily for his action beats and his
poor attempts at comedy in the previous century, one would think that a
Schwarzenegger zombie flick would be a more gun-heavy, mindless affair. And yet, what we have here is a film much
more concerned with providing a simple subtextual tale than it is about killing
zombies.
Maggie takes place
in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse, where the government has mostly
contained the zombie threat, but some stragglers still manage to bite and
infect new victims. Schwarzenegger plays
Wade, a Midwestern farmer whose daughter Maggie (Abigail Breslin) is caught in
the city after curfew when a zombie bites her, leaving her to gradually
transform into one of the monsters. Wade
brings her home, much to the fear and disdain of Maggie’s stepmother, and
treats her as the virus begins to destroy her body and corrupt her mind.
As any aficionado of zombie films will tell you, zombies are
rarely representational of just flesh-eating ghouls, but are generally used to
convey human experiences through supernatural allegory. In Maggie’s
case, terminal illness is the go-to human condition, as Wade helplessly watches
Maggie fall victim to her disease; all those muscles can do nothing to combat the virus in Maggie's veins, so he must cope with a decision to either
turn her in for quarantine or end her suffering himself. This carries an unfortunate implication of
euthanasia advocacy if you take the allegory to its furthest extremes, but this
is mitigated somewhat by Maggie’s insistence that it is necessary to save her
and others. Speaking of which, Breslin
plays a fantastic Maggie, whose subtle transformation is full of fear at what
she’s becoming, yet a distinct humanity that she doesn’t so much cling to as
exude naturally as it is slowly chipped away.
Yet all these trappings tend to feel a little hollow if you
start looking too closely. As I try to
come up with character traits to describe Wade and Maggie, I find myself mostly
at a loss, as their characters seem to exist solely for their place in the
plot. They don’t feel like real people,
but rather puppets acting out a simple story with broadly drawn archetypes. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as the
point of the film is not to be a character study but an allegory, yet it feels
like a wasted opportunity, particularly given how subdued stoicism is new
acting territory for Schwarzenegger, and Breslin doesn’t seem to have much
opportunity to flex her acting muscles these days.
All in all, though, I found that I liked Maggie, even if it was a bit
disappointing in some respects. If it
had insisted on stretching its runtime beyond ninety minutes, I might have felt
differently, but as an exercise in light zombie parable, it’s not too shabby.
Is Arnold Schwarzenegger too old to keep up the action
shenanigans of his youth? Is this a good
direction for his career to go? Leave
your thoughts in the comments below.
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