Review: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016)

My ratingIMDbRotten Tomatoes
CriticsAudienceCriticsAudience
6/1047/1005.7/1043%61%
Numbers obtained from IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes on February 5, 2016.

Being a huge fan of Jane Austen, especially of Pride and Prejudice, I was very skeptical to watch this movie. I still haven’t read the book on which it’s based, but Pride and Prejudice and Zombies really didn’t impress me. I’m not sure if it was intended to be a comedy or a horror movie. Or both. But for me it was neither…

The basic storyline is Jane Austen’s classic romantic tale between Elizabeth Bennet (Lily James) and Mr. Darcy (Sam Riley) with a twist: 19th century England is dominated by zombies. So Elizabeth and her four sisters are very well trained to defeat any zombie that might cross their paths, while Mr. Darcy is an official in charge of also defeating the zombies.

As I mentioned before, there were a lot of times when the audience laughed lot, but I’m not 100% sure that was the intention. Although there was a scene that clearly resembled Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy in the 1997’s BBC version of the book, I don’t think it’s supposed to be one of those trash parodies that usually happen in movies, but I’m just not sure if there was supposed to be that much humor when dealing with zombies: weren’t they supposed to be a little scary?

I don’t know if the movie is going to be as successful as the book, but three people left the theater at the session I was in… so that’s not a very good sign. Let’s wait and see if the movie audience is more interested in zombies than me… I’ll stick with the regular version of the story (and the best movie version, in my opinion, is still the one with Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen)…

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