Land of the Dead (2005)
★★★★ — Land of the Dead (2005)
Even a George A. Romero zombie film that doesn't quite reach the heights of his holy trilogy still leaves most of the genre face-down in the dirt. That's the thing about genuine mastery: the "lesser" work still has more wit, more venom, and more raw filmmaking instinct than the competition can muster on its best day. Land of the Dead is that film, and I'd take it over almost anything else wearing a zombie suit.
The setup is blunt in the best possible way. The rich have retreated into a gleaming skyscraper called Fiddler's Green, sipping champagne and pretending the world hasn't ended, while everyone else scrapes by in the rubble below. Subtlety, as I say, died with the first zombie, and Romero isn't here to dress the metaphor up in polite clothes. This is class warfare with arterial spray, a snot-nosed satire of elitism and the peculiarly human delusion that the right walls, the right money, the right postcode, can keep chaos permanently at bay. Spoiler: they cannot.
What gives the film its real kick, though, is what's happening on the other side of those walls. The zombies are evolving. Led by a figure known as Big Daddy, a tragic and quietly poetic creation, the rotting underclass is starting to organise, to communicate, to get genuinely angry. There's something almost moving about it, which is a sentence I never expected to type about a film in which a man's intestines end up across a car bonnet. Romero earns that feeling, though. He always understood that the monsters in his films are just holding up a mirror.
And then there's John Leguizamo. Good grief. His Cholo is a gloriously unhinged, swaggering, self-deluding opportunist who genuinely believes he's a step away from joining the elite, right up until the universe corrects him in the most emphatic terms imaginable. It's a Shakespearean arc filtered through pure trash-fire energy, and I was cackling at the screen as his hubris unravelled stitch by stitch. Every scene he's in crackles. It makes you wonder, not for the first time, why Leguizamo isn't given the keys to every major production going.
The set-pieces are chaotic and joyful in equal measure. A tank rampage through zombie-infested streets is exactly as much fun as it sounds, and the gore is gloriously, unapologetically squelchy throughout. Romero knows his audience and he delivers. The ending, a gut-punch of poetic justice as the world burns in the most satisfying possible way, left me cheering.
It's not without its faults. Some of the CGI work on the zombie hordes looks a little cheap, and the pacing does sag in places when the film isn't busy blowing something up or skewering something politically. These aren't small niggles, but they're the kind you absorb and move on from, because the overall film is too alive, too angry, too entertaining to let them derail the whole thing.
I've spent time with another of his zombie films and Romero's later work genuinely fascinates me, even when it's messier than this. But Land of the Dead sits comfortably as the strongest of his post-millennial output. It doesn't claw its way into the pantheon alongside Night, Dawn, and Day, and it knows it. What it does instead is make a very loud, very bloody argument that being the fourth-best entry in a masterwork series still puts you miles ahead of the pack.
Four stars. Get the beers in.
Rating: ★★★★ | Year: 2005 | Watched: 2025-06-25
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from George A. Romero: Creepshow (1982) · Jacaranda Joe (2022) · BIOHAZARD 2 TV-CM (1997) · Survival of the Dead (2009)
More from Canada: History of the World in Three Minutes Flat (1980) · Resident Evil: Retribution (2012) · Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016) · Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)
More from the 2000s: Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) · Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) · Daredevil (2003) · Apocalypto (2006)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)
More science fiction: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Fantastic Planet (1973) · Nightmare City (1980) · The Long Walk (2025)
