George A. Romero returns to the genre he invented for this 2005 fourquel about a city overrun by zombies and overseen by a plutocrat (Dennis Hopper).

The success of 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead (films inspired by Romero in the first place) convinced Hollywood to resurrect the original zombie series. Despite the 20-year absence, he picks up where Day of the Dead left off: zombies now outnumber human survivors and have begun to communicate and use weapons.

Romero continues to show great vision for how post-apocalyptic society develops, as the zombies grow more human and the survivors lose their humanity. The rich have locked (or possibly trapped) themselves in a luxury high-rise, leaving the poor to shuffle around in the slums of its shadow. He vividly imagines a state of queasy cohabitation, where the humans use zombies for target practice and make them fight in underground betting rings. It is underworld building at its brutal best.

But once the plot kicks in, Land of the Dead falls apart faster than a stagnating corpse. In a mindless retread of Escape From New York, Hopper sends our uninspiring hero (Simon Baker) to stop a disgruntled former employee (John Leguizamo) from blowing up the tower block. The outcome is surprisingly boring, not least because Leguizamo is the more interesting character whose destruction of the skyscraper would be both entertaining and justified.

The zombie action breathes life into the limp plotting, thanks to fun splatter comedy and gore effects. A black zombie leader (Eugene Clark) also provides nice symmetry with Night of the Living Dead, and Tom Savini reprises his role from Dawn of the Dead (alongside Simon Pegg and Nick Frost cameos). But the picture devotes most of its running (or walking) time to dull human characters, even wasting Hopper in what could have been an opportunity for some scenery-devouring.

Where the previous flicks were independently produced, this is the first instalment with major studio backing. And one wonders if Universal demanded a more commercial action movie from Romero, swapping the wired intensity of the original trilogy for the overly serious and meandering tone of Resident Evil. The result is a ghoulish exhumation that looks like its predecessors, except the soul is gone.