I grew up watching Arnold Schwarzenegger kick ass and take names. Commando, Running Man, Terminator 2, Raw Deal or Red Heat. You name it and I probably saw it six times. He was the king of “Say little and Shoot Often”. He was rarely asked to act and that was a good thing. Action stars are built on presence and stature along with the ability to convince us they can truly destroy things. If a chef in a kitchen is cooking them up, he’s using 2-3 spices instead of five. More one liners than monologues.

For his latest flick, the heartfelt nerve touching zombie flick Maggie, Arnold finally gets to act a little and it’s about time. He’s 67 years old, looks weathered in the face, and didn’t have any work done to his body or face in the last 40 years. What you see is what you get, and Arnold was the perfect choice to play Wade Vogel, a man facing the worst decision of all time. His daughter, Maggie(Abigail Breslin, wonderfully cast to tango with the big Austrian) is infected and is slowly decaying. Instead of letting her be taken into quarantine and live a tortured last set of days before being executed, Wade keeps her at home so he can “take care” of her himself when the time is right.

In this film, the actual word “zombie” is never used once and frankly, it’s not needed. We know what’s going on. Someone is bit and they slowly change into something else. Director Henry Hobson, working from a genuine simplistic piece of goodness in John Scott 3’s script, doesn’t need to turn this into The Terminator Meets The Walking Dead. He wants to go in the other direction and uses a slow burning tactic. Once bitten, the victims don’t change in minutes or overnight. It takes days, hence the need to quarantine them. (more…)