Train to Busan

The South Korean zombie apocalypse action drama Train of Busan poses an interesting question: What if World War Z was a good film? Animation director Sang-ho Yeon makes his live-action feature debut with this hybrid of 28 Days Later, Snowpiercer and Dawn of the Dead, although the film’s imagination and intensity are indebted to the anything-goes aesthetic of cartoons and comic books. As a “douche” fund manager grudgingly accompanies his neglected daughter on a train ride to visit his ex-wife, a chemical leak causes an outbreak of rampaging, flesh-eating, undead monsters, forcing the survivors to band together as the world rushing around them hurtles toward its bloody end. There’s nothing original in the content, and the band of survivors contains every zombie-apocalypse movie archetype imaginable (the pregnant couple, the saucer-eyed child, the bureaucrat coward, etc.), but it’s such a fun, fast, tightly crafted genre film that you could care less. D.B.