'Get The Hell Out': I-Fan Wang's Zombie Action-Comedy Is All Sizzle, No Steak [TIFF Review]

You’ve gotta give “Get the Hell Out” this much: it sure does try hard. This Taiwanese zombie-apocalypse action/comedy is the first feature from director I-Fan Wang, and it’s the kind of movie where you discover that tidbit after the fact and nod knowingly – yes, of course, this was their first feature. It’s so desperate to impress, so intent on loading up every frame and overwhelming you with its style, that it doesn’t feel like a narrative; it feels like a 96-minute director’s reel. It’s not that there aren’t things here that work. But it’s less of a movie than a calling card for his next one.

The screenplay (which the director co-wrote with Shih-Keng Chien and Wan-Ju Yang) parachutes us in, mid-stream, as an unruly, chaotic session in Taiwan’s parliament descends into a blood-spurting zombie buffet. We then circle back to some time before this “zombie crisis,” to meet our players – chief among them Hsiung (Megan Lai), a former MP forced to resign after an embarrassing public brawl, and Wang (Bruce Ho), her likely replacement.

She’s a single-issue politician, and that issue is a sketchy chemical plant near her childhood home. Sure enough, that plant ends up unleashing a “rabies virus” that turns its victims into bloodthirsty undead. (The echoes of “Godzilla”-style eco-terror are surely not accidental.) As the horrors of that spreading infection are matter-of-factly reported on the evening news – one of a handful of accidentally prescient touches – the president comes to Parliament to assuage fears. He ends up wiling out and starting a feeding frenzy in the chamber.

And thus, as anyone who’s seen a Romero movie can predict, we follow a crew of disparate survivors, who have to band together in spite of their differences and fight their way out. As pure genre cinema, “Get the Hell Out” has its virtues: the make-up and effects are giddily entertaining (the blood spurts in geysers, like outtakes from a “Lone Wolf and Cub” movie), and the Stephen Chow-esque attack and fight-back sequences are well-staged. The narrative takes some clever turns and moves at a good clip – though the tempo rarely changes, so the net effect is frankly exhausting.

And there is some juice to the central relationship: the ousted Hsuing wants to use rising star Wang as her mouthpiece in the legislature, and since he secretly loves her, he’s willing – at first. But politics make things complicated, particularly after he falls into the sway of a pro-business gangster type (“You just want to be his pawn,” she charges, and he replies, “I’ve always been your pawn, haven’t I?”). Both actors are likable, Lai particularly so, and the side relationship between her dad and a terminally ill co-worker is lovely; it’s nice when the movie occasionally settles down and lets people talk.

But that doesn’t happen often. I-Fan Wang lathers the picture with more flourishes than a mid-‘90s Oliver Stone movie, and between the guitar-riff score, hyper-kinetic camerawork, animation overlays, cartoon sound effects, comic book text, snap zooms, and video game graphics, it all feels more than a little sweaty. It’s a movie that works very hard to be cool, and that’s the problem; true cool, in cinema and in life, has to at least look effortless.

In time, “Get the Hell Out” will, I’m sure, find an audience that will appreciate its gonzo energy and pure, uncut sense of style. But there’s nothing to it but flash; the picture is so relentlessly razzle-dazzle that its fumbling grabs at pathos in the home stretch don’t connect at all. From frame one, Wang is clearly having a great time. It’s a shame it’s not a bit more infectious. [C-]

Follow along here for all our coverage of the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival.