DVD review: Eastbound and Down/Zombieland

Published on Thursday 11 March 2010 18:05

EASTBOUND AND DOWN: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON WARNER HOME VIDEO, £19.99 ZOMBIELAND SONY, £15.99

LIKE Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, but darker, funnier, more delusional and still decades away from repenting for past sins, Kenny Powers, the talent-squandering baseball icon of HBO comedy Eastbound and Down, proves there's an insatiable appetite for characters crucified by their own hubris.

Played to demented perfection by Danny McBride, the mullet-headed rube most recently seen as George Clooney's new brother-in-law in Up in the Air, Kenny's a human calamity: a professional athlete who has returned to his home town with his tail between his legs after destroying his career thanks to the combined forces of a monstrous ego, a ridiculous sense of self-entitlement and some wildly inappropriate racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic remarks.

Reduced to teaching PE to kids unimpressed by his celebrity notoriety, his new reality naturally begins to eat away at his delusional nature, but only a little bit. Any time it looks as if things are going to get sentimental, he rocks up with another horrendously inappropriate observation, joke or gesture to bring the cringe. Whether he's using the f-word as punctuation, listening to his own motivational tapes or verbally abusing his students, Kenny is consistently crude, rude and lewd but, thanks to McBride, oddly sweet.

As knuckle-gnawing as The Office, but mining the darker side of delusion, this is comedy as black and as close to the bone as it gets.

There are plenty of laughs in Zombieland too. Unafraid to call a zombie a zombie – these flesh-eaters are mercifully free of the kind of political subtexts that have turned the undead into shuffling bores of late – the fun begins with a riotous, slo-mo prologue that establishes the tongue-through-the-cheek tone, the source of the virus and Zombieland's hero and narrator. This is Columbus, a virginal, awkward shut-in with irritable bowel syndrome, whose lack of social skills has equipped him well for life in a country decimated by the living dead.

Played with jittery self-deprecation and sweet-natured nerdiness by Jesse Eisenberg (riffing on his Roger Dodger/ Adventureland screen persona), in the few weeks it has taken the zombie pandemic to wipe out most of the US, he's survived by adhering to a strict set of rules flashed up on screen every time they're put to use in the action – a savvy joke that gently mocks the groaning clichs of the genre and grows tired precisely never.