You kids today just don't understand what it was like in the old days, when zombie movies were exotically rare, and when Arnold Schwarzenegger as a dad looking out for his daughter meant fully automatic genocide on behalf of pre-teen Alyssa Milano in Commando. How the sheltered boy-man loins were stirred back then! Admittedly the ho-hum factor in Maggie — with wearied Ahnuld as protector of a gradually festering young Abigail Breslin against ominous martial-law quarantine — might only be a matter of fuddy-duddy perspective. To be fair, he snaps someone's neck in the first 10 minutes, and takes an ax to someone else's a little later, but they were zombies; that's just what you do. The rest seems like a lot of moping around: Here he is having a worried smoke by some biohazard bins, there squeezing a single tear from his unprecedentedly grizzled face. It's Breslin who does most of the crying, on account of her unfortunate diagnosis, that "necro-ambulist viral epidemic." Filmmaker Henry Hobson has a good eye for dusky scenes of fallow earth and ashen skies. And just because a notable public health emergency has happened doesn't mean this can't also be one of those little indies in which attractive young people exude their attractive youth by running around with sparklers in music-covered montages. This does increase the poignancy of some of them being doomed to become putrescent cannibals. And there goes the species; Terminator not even required.
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