Maggie
DIRECTOR: Henry Hobson
CAST: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Abigail Breslin, Joely Richardson, Douglas M Griffith, Jd Evermore, Rachel Whitmore Groves
CLASSIFICATION: 13 HV
RUNNING TIME: 99 minutes
RATING: 3 stars (out of 5)
Theresa Smith
A zombie apocalypse story starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Maggie is low on the gory action and surprisingly thoughtful.
Bleak, measured, melancholic and subtle this is a story about what makes us human, not about soul-less flesh-eating monsters that go bump in the night.
There are no hordes of lurching creatures or leather clad action figures saving the day. Instead, what we have is people trying to live while the world around them is dying and the sun doesn’t shine much on anyone.
Concentrating on the relationship between father Wade Vogel (Schwarzenegger) and teenaged daughter Maggie (Abigail Breslin) the film is light on apocalyptic detail, but features strong performances by the leads.
Set in Midwest America the film doesn’t spend much time on context, simply giving us grey skies and a desolate farming community background where people burn crops to mitigate some sort of a blight.
As Wade drives off to the big city through deserted streets and highways, we catch glimpses of Maggie being attacked, bitten, and as we soon find out, infected by some sort of zombie being.
Most of what happened before is never really explained, so you don’t get the chronology of their father daughter relationship or how they were with each other before the zombies-who-eat-people came on the scene.
Wade brings his daughter home against medical advice and despatches his wife’s (Richardson) other children to relatives.
Maggie and her father spend time talking about her long-dead mother, reinforcing the idea they trust each other implicitly. He has to wrestle with the idea that if he doesn’t kill her as the family doctor urges him to do, the disease will strip her of everything that makes her who she is.
The film turns on this idea with Schwarzenegger plumbing previously unknown depths of tenderness and instead of playing the larger-than-life hero, he is believable as a dad trying to behave normally towards his daughter in an abnormal situation. As Maggie deteriorates, she is realistically horrified by how her body betrays her, but at the same time this is her coming of age moment as she starts to take responsibility for herself, even as she is slowly losing that ability.
The ending is a total cop-out which obviates all the good work done by Schwarzenegger and Breslin.
If you liked Homefront, you will like this.