Harry Treadaway in COCKNEYS VS. ZOMBIES (Shout Factory)

From years back, you might remember a little movie called Shaun of the Dead, where a guy with relationship problems has his life upended by a zombie outbreak. In that movie, the comedy came out of characters we could invest in right from the get-go, and the zombies were in the background, almost as an afterthought, appearing about a third or halfway through. This is not to hammer too much of a comparison to that and Cockneys vs. Zombies. I mean, the latter title sounds like a gag right from the start.

But is it still too much to ask to give us characters to care about even in a movie with such a moniker? This isn’t to say that the filmmakers don’t try, a little, at first. Before the zombie madness, we’re plopped into the story of the Bow Bells Care Home, run by Ray (Alan Ford, who you might remember as That One REALLY Angry Bugger from Guy Ritchie’s early movies). To save the money losing old age home from the wrecking ball, a bank robbery is plotted by his two grandsons, Terry and Andy (Rasmus Hardiker and Harry Treadaway), along with their cousin Katy (Michelle Ryan) to pay off a real estate developer. Things go awry, of course, mostly due to a hot-headed crazy cohort, Mental Mickey (Ashley Thomas, the coolest looking out of all of them because of a giant scar on his head), and the fact that a zombie outbreak spreads in London’s East End. Oops.

How did the epidemic happen? Eh, who cares really. Same old same old, maybe it was radiation, maybe something in the water. Nevertheless, our bank-robbing foils (including two hostages) and the old blokes and ladies at the rest home have to fend off the hordes. By this point, we know a little about the brothers—one gets into more trouble, the other has to bail him out, and their parents died when they were young. And we also know that Old Ray is hard-as-hell and gruff because he needs to be. Aside from that, every one is given a trait, or maybe half a trait.

This doesn’t mean that the filmmakers, with a premise like this, don’t try for some comedy. Oh, they do try. Maybe a bit too hard. Some of it is clever, if just on a conceptual basis. One of the old fogies has to out-run one of the zombies—luckily, they are slow zombies. But the rub: he’s an old man with a walker. This sequence has the kind of deadpan comic momentum as a memorable chase in Children of Men, only now with an undead and a near-dead man.

But some jokes are centered on the excessive gore, which wears itself out after the 10th or 12th zombie is torn apart with CGI blood splattering everywhere (a particular pet peeve of mine with these films), and some of it may be regional. An odd gag occurs where our human heroes watch one set of zombies attack another set of zombies. They’re rival football fans, I guess. Maybe in the U.K. this would get a big laugh. And a lot of the behavioral tics—the good McGuire brother stopping at a red light and not moving until the light changes, even as, again, IT’S THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE!!—just feel tired.

Some of the actors try to give it their all, even under these constraints. It’s hard not to like Ford even as (or maybe because) he doesn’t deviate one iota from his cranky bastard of a character, or like seeing Pussy Galore herself, Honor Blackman, fighting it out as one of the home’s residents. But too much is cookie cutter, too many of the main characters survive, and it all goes by both too quickly and yet feels padded with ultra-violent set pieces. I don’t expect in Cockneys vs. Zombies a great film or even a very good one. But if a little more time had been spent on the script, to add more meat to the characters, or just little specks of actual drama amid its light (yes, light) comic touch, then it could have been something more than a cheap Redbox rental.