Michael C. here to review Maggie
The buzz on Henry Hobson’s Maggie has focused on the novelty of blockbuster icon Arnold Schwarzenegger starring in a low-budget indie drama, which is akin to seeing Daniel Day-Lewis star in a Farrelly brother’s comedy. There is an undeniable fascination in seeing one of filmdom’s most famous men-of-action play a character defined by his powerlessness. The invincible violence machine that once laid waste to entire armies single-handedly now gets into a believable hand-to-hand struggle with some schmuck deputy sheriff and almost loses.
Arnold’s performance is one of the main reasons to see Maggie, and it doesn’t need to operate on that meta-level to work. There is nary a trace of the one-time blockbuster God on the screen this time out. There are no quips. No poses. No winks to the camera. As Wade, Schwarzenegger’s star charisma remains in tact, only this time it is tempered by a new vulnerability. Set well into an unfolding zombie apocalypse, all Wade wants is to rescue his daughter Maggie (Abigail Breslin) from the zombie virus with which she is infected, but we watch those Mr. Universe shoulders droop under the weight of sadness as Maggie’s veins gradually turn black and congeal. This disease is one enemy Arnold can’t destroy.
The film opens on Wade rescuing his infected daughter from a sure-to-be horrific quarantine in the big city. Our concern grows as we realize the full extent of his plan is to take her back to his farm house where he can care for her in her decline from beautiful young lady to dead-eyed monster. Throughout this opening, and Maggie as a whole, the film is content to let other zombie movies do the heavy lifting of world building. This freedom gives the movie extra time to get into the nitty-gritty of Maggie’s case, which it aims to document detail by ghastly detail.
(The set up does raise the question of what the hell kind of quarantine let’s the infected run loose in public as long as they promise to return back once they become really dangerous. It’s a shame this isn’t a more traditional gore-fest, if only because the people running this system richly deserve to be eaten by zombies.)
Hobson’s movie shows impressive restraint in its willingness to pass up the usual horror beats in favor of something more quiet and observant than we might expect. When an infected character goes in for a hug, it’s because the movie want to show a hug, not make the audience worry if the other person is about to get their face bit off. Well, there is a little of that. It is a zombie flick after all. The unhurried attention allows for a few good scenes other horror scripts might not have time for, like when a deteriorating Maggie steals a brief last night of romance with another infected boy. The problem is that father and daughter are such sparsely developed characters that the film rarely feels like more than an inconsequential genre riff. Even more detrimental is the screenplay's failure to find twists or complication in its central dilemma. Either Wade has to put his daughter down as mercifully as possible or he will be forced to hand her over for impersonal extermination. We understand this early on and can quickly guess where this story will end up, causing Maggie to be something of a tension-free zone.
I appreciate the film’s design to clear away the tropes of the genre in order to do something intimate and poetic. The tired zombie clichés Maggie omits were not missed. But at some point the story crosses the line from minimalist to undercooked. I felt myself urging Hobson to grab the material by both hands and dig into the story’s implications or to veer off in some unexpected direction. As it stands, Maggie never really rings false exactly. What it does it does with sensitivity and a sharp eye for gruesome details. But it’s hard to say that this is a film that the overstuffed zombie genre particularly needs. Even with all that extra attention to detail, if we’re being brutally honest, we’ve seen other zombie films, maybe dozens of them, cover this ground to equal or greater affect. Off the top of my head, a similar subplot with Brendan Gleeson and his daughter in 28 Days Later packs more punch and it does so without the benefit of Maggie’s 95 min. running time.
Grade C+