Shorter, straighter-faced, altogether squarer remake of the George Romero zombie bash. The "commentary" on American consumerism, or anyway the locality of a Middle American shopping mall, remains as pertinent today as in 1979, if scarcely as fresh. And the cannibalism now seems to pertain not so much to the society at large as to a depleted film industry overly dependent on blood-sucking remakes. The same could have been said, in fact did get said, of the 1990 remake of Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Little has changed in that respect. In another respect, the escalation of video-game violence on screen (whether or not this can be connected to things like Columbine off screen) makes the mowing-down of the zombies seem so far from fresh as to be downright rancid. The most boring revision of the material is no doubt the juicing-up of the walking dead — the wobbling, staggering, stumbling dead, in Romero's version — with a new, athletic speed and strength. A more constructive new idea was to locate the gun shop across the street from the mall instead of inside it: the first step in the eventual migration toward a nearby island sanctuary. Where the movie ends is where it should have begun. With Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames, Jake Weber, Mekhi Phifer; directed by Zack Snyder. (2004) — Duncan Shepherd