When your first movie becomes a breakout hit (and the highest-grossing zombie movie of all time at that point), it's almost inevitable that the studio are going to want a sequel. And so, ten years after the original Zombieland (2009), Ruben Fleischer is back with Zombieland: Double Tap (2019), a movie whose driving principle seems to be: "If it ain't broke, don't try to fix it."

The stars of the first film -- Abigail Breslin, Emma Stone, Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg -- all return to reprise their wise-cracking, zombie-slaying roles, while the plot, too, hews fairly closely to that of the first movie; road trips are undertaken, groups form and then separate, there's a fabled location free of zombies that they attempt to reach, only to require rescuing in the final act by their returning friends. Presentation-wise, little has changed either; the zombies are still extremely well done, the violence stylised and often in blood-spatteringly slow motion. The on-screen captions integrated into the action, though, lack the novelty of their use in the first movie.

There are of course a handful of fun new tweaks to the old formula. Luke Wilson and Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch make a brief appearance as near mirrors of Harrelson and Eisenberg's characters before meeting a predictable end, and Zoey Deutch does a great job with the cliched character of Madison (who the writers of She-Hulk should really credit with their own version). But Rosario Dawson's character is sadly far too one-dimensional, and, at 40, arguably miscast as 58-year-old Woody Harrelson's romantic interest. And the utterly pointless mid-credits sequence, apparently just an excuse to crowbar Bill Murray into the film, sadly only serves to leave a bad taste in the mouth.

At the end of the day, though, there's little more you really need from a zombie flick than hundreds of zombies being slaughtered, and in this, at least, Zombieland: Double Tap does deliver.

6/10