Film review: World War Z

Runtime: 116 minutes

FRANTIC crowds pelt down the road, street signs quiver and big yellow taxis look very small indeed in the face of a zombie-led onslaught. Kudos to Marc Forster, director of World War Z, for turning the streets around George Square in Glasgow into the dead spit of downtown Philadelphia.

There are other, more obvious, ways in which this zombie horror is not like others. Chief among them is the presence of Brad Pitt, whose Plan B production company has steered the film through rewrites and reshoots that have helped push the budget towards a rumoured cost of $200 million – unheard of for a horror movie.

The presence of Pitt, playing a former UN high honcho trying to save the world from a deadly virus, lends World War Z a certain tone and attitude. Between Pitt playing a devoted dad and loving husband, and the low levels of drool, pus, blood and gore, this must be the most female-friendly zombie movie ever made. Only if Pitt spent half the movie mending a broken dishwasher could it be more calculated to appeal to one half of the audience.

Add to this Forster's preference for generating tension and slow-burn thrills over shlock, horror and splat, and you have a very strange beast indeed. It may not entirely satisfy the blood lust of hardcore horror fans, but it is a surprisingly entertaining, twisty, satisfying piece. While there are flaws, the picture is a long way from the unholy mess the doomsayers, eyeing the delayed release date, have been predicting.

As if to make up for directing one of the dullest Bonds of modern times in Quantum of Solace, Forster starts at breakneck pace and barely lets up. After a minute or two establishing that Gerry (Pitt) has put aside his jet-setting, emergency work for the UN in favour of family life, Forster puts said family in fear of their lives. An ordinary car trip in Philadelphia/Glasgow turns into a mad scramble for safety as the shrieking undead set upon the living. Most of us would reckon this to be an ordinary Saturday night in a Glasgow peppered with hen parties, but Gerry, trained in these things, knows better. He must get his family to safety and then, as his bosses at the UN require, find out what is going on.

By this point, fans of Brooks's novel will have sussed that this is not going to be a faithful, step by step adaptation. Sure enough, there are three people on screenplay duty, plus story contributors, a sure sign of narrative trouble to come, and so it proves. Particularly towards the end, the joins in the story are only too obvious. For now, Forster has to get Gerry the virus detective going on his world tour. As Gerry says, in situations like these it's a case of keep moving or die. He certainly keeps moving, hopping flights to locations including an aircraft carrier in the North Atlantic, the Far East, Israel and, bizarrely, Wales.

On the subject of bizarre, he is accompanied on one of these jaunts by a kick-ass Navy Seal commander played by our own dear John Gordon Sinclair. You've come a long way from Gregory's Girl, baby. Pitt also casts another local hero, Peter Capaldi, as a World Health Organisation doctor. Mr Pitt must have really enjoyed his pit stop in Scotland to return the favour this much.

With the outbreak being likened to the 1918 flu pandemic, the race is on to find out how to halt its spread. This gives Forster his cue to kick into full-on action movie mode, with plenty of set pieces involving crazed-with-fear humans in flight from desperate zombies. Since the "zekes", as soldiers call the zombies, are sensitive to sound, there is lots of creeping around and playing hide and seek. What better way, grandma, to keep an audience on the edge of its nerves. It's crude, but very effective, with big scares, and similarly sized tension-puncturing laughs, to be had.

In the course of his travels, and adding to the female-friendliness of the picture, Gerry acquires the help of an Israeli soldier, Segen (played by Danielle Kertesz). Segen helps Gerry with the heavy lifting of running, shooting and zombie fighting, generally being the superwoman to his superman.

Sterling though her service is, the main man here is inevitably Pitt. With his shoulder-length hair and beard, Pitt works the Jesus-hippy-dippy look hard. We know from past pictures he can do action and drama, but here, in the most unlikely of circumstances, he shows himself to have nifty comic timing skills as well.

When much else goes to pot, with the story giving the zombies a run for their money when it comes to alarming fits and jerks, Pitt stands straight and true. In his hands, zombie films really are miles better.