World War Z (Marc Forster, 2013)

6.5/10
I haven't read the book, so I'll steer clear of that discussion entirely, although from what I understand they pretty much only share a name in common.
This is a strange movie, because despite its checkered production, it does a lot of things right. Better than probably any zombie movie I've ever seen, it did a great job showing a zombie epidemic on a truly massive scale. Not just in the globe-trotting scenes but in the sheer amount of zombies and how quickly entire major cities are overrun. I liked how the movie hit the ground running and the pace made for an exciting middle section that pulled me along nicely as Pitt's character zipped around looking for a cure. The final act really let the movie down, and felt like it was stitched in from a previous, lesser version of the same movie I was just watching. The "stealth mission" in the hospital to get the MacGuffin was weak, the ending was telegraphed from a mile away, and it includes one of the most weirdly jarring instances of product placements I've ever seen. I won't spoil the ending but it's the one you knew you'd get 5 minutes into the movie anyway.
The movie relies on way too many tropes for its own good - Pitt as the retiree called to do One Last Job, his daughter with the useless ailment that vanishes from the storyline a half hour in, the gruff army badass...it's hard not to feel like these are pieces cobbled together from the many revisions the script endured...and even harder to not roll your eyes when they show up.
Interestingly the zombies are treated pretty anonymously - no gruesome set pieces, no crazy kills, almost no gore and a minimal amount of blood. I'm sure it was done to lock down a PG-13 rating but I think it served the film well too - too often zombie movies can feel "too cinematic", self-consciously one-upping prior zombie movies in makeup or in CGI or distracting set pieces. Here it felt like a bit more of an authentic treatment of zombies as an epidemic and not just a way to shock or scare the audience.
Considering how disastrous the movie was expected to be and how much it apparently strays from its source material, it's pretty passable entertainment. It could have been a lot more, but I guess it could have been a lot worse too.