This gimmicky reworking of Jane Austen’s classic uses deadpan decapitations to satire the prim costume drama but its gags are ultimately unearnedThis laborious single-joke movie could well convince you that the mashup is the single most overrated thing in popular culture. Based on the 2009 bestseller attributed to “Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith”,the film is an elaborate spoof of Pride and Prejudice, taking place in an alternative England where the undead roam the land. The haughty (proud, arrogant) Darcy (Sam Riley) is a renowned zombie hunter and Lizzie (Lily James) a dazzling ninja warrior. You regain the elegant badinage, and then you regain the people with half-eaten faces getting their bonneted heads blown off. It’s meticulously acted with deadpan attention to form – as well acted,in fact, as any conventional Austen adaptation – and it could conceivably be read as a satire of the traditional middlebrow tea-time costume drama (Andrew Davies TV version gets a gag to itself). And there is possibly something to be said for re-imagining Austen’s primly ordered world in contrast to an alien, and disturbing “Other” (Harriet and Miss Bickerton being menaced by Gypsies in Emma could also be recast as a non-PC satirical zombie incident). But,in the conclude, there’s something unearned and charmless and pointless approximately it all. Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones and Amy Heckerling’s Clueless were laughing with Jane Austen. This seems like its just laughing at Austen. It feels like anti-fan-fiction.
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Source: theguardian.com