Hello,
and welcome to another installment of “I Saw This Movie So You Don’t Have To!”
Yes, “I Tilled Your Garden So You Don’t Have To” probably would have been much
more helpful, but I figured I’d take one for the team and bear witness to the
dull zombie drama “Maggie,” Arnold Schwarzenegger’s crack at being a real
thespian. We’ve encountered this phenomenon before, where creaky action heroes
make a play for indie cred (thinking of Stallone in 1997’s “Cop Land” or Van Damme in 2008’s “JCVD”), and usually no one embarrasses
themselves too badly. But once the novelty of manly vulnerability wears off,
the question is whether the person can truly act, and in Schwarzenegger’s case
the answer may surprise you.
Just kidding! The answer is no. But
for “Maggie” the former governor of California does give it the ol’ college try
as Wade, a reticent Midwestern farmer who we’re first introduced to as he
drives through a devastated landscape. The radio broadcast in his ratty truck
clues us in to a “necroambulist virus outbreak,” and
we soon meet one of its latest victims, Wade’s teenaged daughter Maggie
(Abigail Breslin, a long way from “Little Miss
Sunshine”). Sciencey details explain how Maggie has
several weeks to live before what’s euphemistically described as “the turn.”
(The Z-word is never used.) That timetable allows the film to explore the
shared journey of Wade and Maggie coming to terms with her impending death,
including his efforts to prolong their time together whenever anyone comes
around with talk of quarantine.
The undead are typically a metaphor
for things like herd mentality, virus hysteria, and terminal illness, but in
light of the cultural juggernaut that is “The Walking Dead,” it’s nearly
impossible at this point to say anything new about the victims, or more
accurately, the survivors. “Maggie” even kind of looks like a desaturated knockoff of “Walking Dead” season 2 at
Hershel’s farm, with Malick-ish vistas and walkers —
I mean zombies — sorry; necroambulists — trapped in
locked rooms or lurching out of the woods. What’s odd is that first-time
director Henry Hobson had to know he was going over well-trodden ground; as a
title designer, he worked on a few episodes of “The Walking Dead.” But Hobson
does refrain from major gore, opting mostly to fill the spaces between debut
screenwriter John Scott 3’s bare-bones dialogue with leisurely scenes of people
looking sad, scared, concerned, or confused.
That last state of being actually
plays to Schwarzenegger’s strengths; he doesn’t seem quite sure what to do
during the quieter moments besides furrow his brow and attempt emotion. The
once and future Terminator at least looks believably worn out, with the creases
of a man closing in on 70 and a scraggly gray beard that distractingly does not
match his suspiciously dark hair. And even though she
gets off to a rocky start leaning too heavily on sullen teen, it’s not shocking
that “Maggie” is mostly Breslin’s movie. There’s no
mystery about what will ultimately happen, but Breslin
manages to infuse situations with a hint of unpredictability as her taste for
human flesh grows. Schwarzenegger’s no match for her, though, unable to chew
even the scenery.
This article appears in May 20-26, 2015.
