The modern landscape of Japanese cinema features no shortage of genre fare taking their inspiration and/or origins from the world of anime. Most of those adaptations, though, arrived several years after their series premiere or original broadcast, which makes the new effort from director Yusuke Ishida quite curious, with his latest venture being a live-action version of “Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead” now screening on Netflix the same year as a series adaptation appears on Crunchyroll.
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Surviving a zombie apocalypse beats being a wage slave any day. After spending years slaving away for a soul-crushing company, Akira's (Eij Akaso) life has lost its luster. He lives in a trash-filled apartment, his pay is abysmal, and he can't even muster up the nerve to confess his love to a beautiful co-worker. But when a zombie apocalypse ravages his town, he meets fellow survivors Kenichiro (Shuntaro Yanagi) and Shizuka (Mai Shiraishi) who give him the push he needs to live for himself. Now Akira's on a mission to complete all 100 items on his bucket list before he kicks the bucket.
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There's quite a lot to like with “Zom 100.” Among the better features is writer/director Ishida's solid setup which provides a great touch on the modern workplace experience in Japan. Akira's initial optimism and eagerness to work for a high-profile corporation at the beginning, when he's hired, is almost immediately wiped out and turned into the type of depressed, dejected worker who exists solely to crunch the numbers and perform paperwork. The relentless bullying he experiences from his superiors belittling him for trying to think outside what they want in a mindless drone causes Akira to give up his dreams and desires to continue working, speaks quite heavily to the type of culture experienced there. The constant overtime and lack of personal time for little pay and no social life drive him to the point of looking at the zombie apocalypse as a way to escape having a job to go to. The contrast makes for a striking indictment of how workers and various employees are handled in this type of system which gets brought to the forefront even more so once Akira and his friends arrive at the aquarium. It all creates a rather dynamic story that keeps this moving along nicely.
As well, there's quite a lot to like once “Zom 100” starts bringing in the zombies more prominently. The initial swarming scenes of the creatures running wild in the city and taking out civilians trying to escape or seek shelter in the local surroundings, only bring more zombies towards them which gives quite a lot to like. This becomes quite heavily focused later on as Akira and Kencho start bumping into survivors and try to save those they come across, resulting in some big encounters throughout the city to some rather fun scenes of them using some impressive defensive tactics to stay out of their grasp. The aspect nicely mixes comedic touches with sincere ones for a nice bit of suspense. That type of sequence is repeated nicely throughout the rest of the encounters where a mix of comedic touches, genuine thrills, and high-stakes spectacle make for a series of solid times, letting the practical effects and just enough CGI bring about some fun scenes trying to escape from the creatures.
There are some issues with “Zom 100” that hold it down. The main drawback here is the confusingly abrupt nature of how Akira comes to start the titular bucket list. This concept comes about out of nowhere and after only one real experience with the zombies, on the first day no less, so its induction into the film feels somewhat short-sighted. Most of the items on the list itself just seem randomly thrown in as well, so the whole concept has very little build-up or emotional impact. It all serves as a means of keeping the zombies front and center while Akira carries out these tasks for his life-affirming lesson, which is quite distressing. The other issue here is the rather overlong running time. Constantly running into characters and different scenarios of trying to be the hero causes there to be a lot of fun action but it also ends up making for a markedly excessive running time. It becomes far more obvious once the group gets to the actual attempts at carrying out the bucket list but there's still a lot of the movie spent carrying on to beef up the running time.
Featuring plenty of strong positives and only a few drawbacks, “Zom 100” comes off incredibly well even if the latter do prevent it from reaching the upper echelons of the genre as a result. Viewers curious about the adaptation of the source material, are big into Asian horror, or are massive zombie film fans, in general, should be the main audience for this one.
