Judging director Jim Jarmusch’s talent strictly based off of his newest feature The Dead Don’t Die would be like if I were someone who had never seen Spielberg’s previous projects that came before Ready Player One and had already formed my full opinion on him. I am still astronomically curious in investigating Jarmusch’s career—I, in particular, have been vastly anticipating watching Dead Man and Stranger than Paradise for years now. The Dead Don’t Die was an…interesting…first look into this man’s inner workings, to say the least—for me, of course.
The Dead Don’t Die is one of those quirky parodies that does regrettably, at times, feel like it’s just being peculiarly dry for the sake of being peculiarly dry, but it does, for the most part, work as a dark comedy. It’s got a stellar cast that’ll make a Wes Anderson alignment appear like child’s play and does cascade down as some paradoxical amalgamation of an episode of Fargo and an episode of The Walking Dead.
The Dead Don’t Die tries to play pins and needles with the zombie genre and while it does hit the clichés quite accurately, it does occasionally feel like the average zombie flick that it’s trying so hard to make fun of. But when the movie is intentionally comical to that of an extremist’s heights, it works, but it does dabble with that “too easy and too random” sort of texture that many “artists” have become accused with before.
Verdict: C+
“The Dead Don’t Die” is now playing in theaters.
Burning the Celluloid 
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