Director: Stefan Ruzowitzky
Distributor: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Duration: 87 minutes
Patient Zero (Blu-ray) – Movie Review
Hear me out, it’s not just a zombie movie! Is probably how the director got into the offices of Screen Gem. He then explains the premise of the movie and he gets them on board, heck the elevator pitch is going so well, Stefan Ruzowitzky not only gets the funds and the backing of Screen Gem, but also a shot at a theatre showing. So he’s going to make it big. The stars are alight in his eyes. Then the stars start falling and before he knows it, the theatre showings are canned and the movie goes straight to DVD/Blu-ray.
Patient Zero starts off with narration. It’s there to make it clear that this isn’t just another zombie movie, as the antagonists, aren’t zombies, but people with a mutated strain of rabies. Super-rabies if you will. This causes them to be overcome with rage and anger, which makes them prone to attack anyone in sight. Highly volatile creatures. So they aren’t dead, but do act like aggressive zombies. After the scene cuts to Morgan (Matt Smith) waking up from a nightmare where his wife was assaulted by the infected and turned. The problem here lies that Matt Smith is a great actor, but his performance doesn’t work quite well with this movie. The casting choice for this role has completely missed the mark. Matt Smith does well, but here his energy is all over the place, like he’s constantly going out of character. The one thing that makes this movie interesting is that Morgan can talk to the infected, as he has been bitten, but hasn’t turned. So the interaction between him and the other infected and the interrogations are quite intriguing in the search of ‘The Patient Zero’ that can end the nightmare. It’s a cool twist to see how the infected seem to have evolved as the strain spread. What’s left of humanity is desperately in search of this mythical infected as he or she is the key to curing the infection and being the savior of humanity.
So Matt Smith was a casting mistake, that doesn’t mean that all the cast isn’t up to snuff. ‘The Professor’ (Stanley Tucci) is absolutely amazing and his performance just shines. He can be menacing in such a way that he can make anything sound ominous. Dr. Gina Rose is being played by Natalie Dormer, the actress who also played in Game of Thrones.
So you’d think with such a strong cast, with actors from Dr Who, Game of Thrones, even from Captain America: The First Avenger, there would be no problem with making a movie worth watching. Nothing could be further from the truth. Patient Zero is an absolute pile of garbage, there are some interesting moments, but it takes the plot from other movies and does things way less impactful. The writing is just cliché after cliché and it doesn’t work. It’s not to be laid at the feet of the actors as they are really trying their best with what they are given. The interrogation scenes with Matt Smith are quite tense and that’s the only good thing to be said about the movie. For the rest, the sex scene feels forced, the love plot is uninspired and the ‘twist’ at the end is just laughable and worthy of mocking. Also, a note to the director, don’t do philosophy in a zombie/horror movie. It just falls flat.
It’s not even very good as a horror movie as it’s more of an action movie. This is because true horror is best done by leaving your enemy unnamed and barely shown. This is not the case with Patient Zero. The music isn’t bad and services the more tense moments in the movie. There’s also a fun use of music in the movie which is intertwined with the plot, so that’s a nice twist. Just to make the point on how bad this movies is, is the fact that this movie has been shot in 2015 and afterwards had been shelved for several years before being released.
It gets even better, as the movie has been released on Blu-ray, which boasts giant amounts of possible data to be stored and the only thing you get as a viewer is about 90 minutes of view-time. It’s not even like the director put in the bloopers as an ironic jab at what he produced. There should be more, even for the sake of being able to defend the reasoning behind putting it on a Blu-ray.
Conclusion
Patient Zero is a mess pur sang. This isn’t because of the actors, but because of the material they are given. The writing is so atrocious not even an all-star cast can make it shine. The plot is lackluster and there are no extra features on the disc, so there is little to no reason to watch it. Other horror movies in the same vein have done what Patient Zero is trying to do and have done so better.
Patient Zero (Blu-ray) - Movie Review,
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