It would be a contortionist feat to find much relevance or depth amongst all the gloss and noise in Breck Eisner's (Sahara) paint-by-numbers update of this somewhat obscure George Romero flick, The Crazies. The original was in 1973, but like most of the Zombie Ambassador's work, it is getting a modest budget make-over (with vampires in vogue at the moment, wither 1977s Martin?) that is all spit and polish in the technical department at the unfortunate cost of, well, actually saying much of anything. Let us be blunt, there is not one damn thing in The Crazies that was not handled significantly smarter, swifter and more stylish in Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's 28 Weeks Later.

*Some Spoilers Ahead*

The small 'mainstreet' town of Ogden Marsh that is placed under violent and brutal quarantine after a virus (keeping the original's moniker, Trixie) accidentally gets in the water supply and within about 48 hours turns the locals into 'fast zombies' with enough brains to target their own loved ones before moving onto the general populace. The many uninfected citizens are either butchered by their own infected family members or they are rounded up and brutalized by the anonymously threatening Hazmat suited military or the gun totin' red-necks that use the chaos as an excuse to start shootin' whomever they damn-well please. Like Romero's "Dead" movies, this is a lesson that humanity under pressure is not very adept at team work and any sufficiently strained situation rapidly spirals out of control. The voice of reasonable violence is Sheriff Dutton (Timothy Olyphant) who is introduced by shooting the town drunk who happens to be wielding a fire arm during towns highschool baseball game. Making the call of when to shoot the locals (or army-guy interlopers) is I suppose the message of the film. Being that it is an action driven horror film, that particular action is taken whenever possible. Gathering his pregnant doctor-wife (Radha Mitchell) and his trusty wise-cracking deputy, Dutton aims to get out of dodge by whatever means necessary.

The actors acquit themselves nicely in between all the running around. Olyphant, who is the American Voice of Reason(tm), channels some of that Deadwood intensity, but also has a halfway decent repartee with the townsfolk. A scene where the Sheriff casually confronts a man who is abandoning his wife in the wake of the chaos, suggests the Sheriff do the same; Olyphant's curt response is one of the better moments in the film. Sheriff Duttons no nonsense 'lets just keep going because we have to' is a certainly sums up 'Mericun can-do spirit even if there is a bit of a dark streak down the middle. Joe Anderson gets the competent-yet-possibly-infected sidekick role and he is fun to watch, though the picture abandons the character ("I may not be worldly, but I have plans") for the usual save-the-hero sacrifice and the films one potential wild card disappears into the ether. Radha Mitchell, no stranger to the genre with leading roles in Rogue, Pitch Black and Silent Hill, is unfortunately relegated to second (or third) fiddle, wandering into dark places and/or being saved by her man at the last second.

A final act, wide-screen firebombing is a pretty but less potent of an image than similar detonations in Watchmen, Indiana Jones IV, or as mentioned previously, 28 Weeks Later.  A Johnny Cash song during the opening credits (which Zak Snyder did better in his own Romero update, Dawn of the Dead; perhaps a more appropriate opening number both for the audience and the film would have been The Clash's Should I Stay or Should I go?), a Joss Whedon/J.J. Abrams styled prologue-teaser followed by "2 Days Earlier..." and many more familiar elements only underscore just how much on autopilot the filmmaking is here. Call me crazy (nyuck, nyuck), but perhaps that is what crashed the military plane in the first place, the jet-pilot was watching better infection horror-movies on his hacked military issue Tom-Tom.