Review by Dustin Hall
Another day gone by, and once again, the God-made-mortal-flesh, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the greatest onscreen presence EVER has once again graced us with another film.
The verdict: you probably won’t like it.
That said, Maggie isn’t a bad film. It just really isn’t the horror film it was branded as. Instead viewers enter a world sometime after the zombie apocalypse has happened and been narrowly contained. The infected and undead are being rounded up and placed into quarantine where they are eventually put down when their humanity fades away. In this world, we meet Schwarzenegger’s Wade Vogel, a simple farmer whose daughter has been missing for the last two weeks. When he finds young Maggie, she’s been bitten, and has been hiding lest her family discover the terrible truth. Taking her back home regardless, Wade does his best to make his daughter feel comfortable, and forget the horrors of the thing she will become, while trying to also dodge the frequent visits of the local police who prowl the area looking for infected to drag off to quarantine.
While the film is billed as a horror and set in a zombie-filled countryside, there’s almost no horror or intensity to be found, much to the dismay of many horror viewers. Common comments on IMDB include gems like “Should have had a zombie assault on the farm.” “Needed Arnie fighting more zombies.” and “Needed a bloodier payoff at the end.” I grant you, those would have been very entertaining scenes, but that isn’t this movie. Maggie is honestly more a drama than a horror, and the zombie virus raging through Maggie’s veins could have just as well been replaced with an inoperable cancer, and the movie would have progressed in much the same way, as a family prepares to see their beloved daughter succumb to an inevitable end. In this case the zombie aspect seems to have been added to make the encroaching demise more unique visually, and also to force Wade to be the one to make the choice, ‘Do I put my daughter down myself or let strangers drag her off?’, making his decision very weighty. The horror here comes not from monsters or bloodshed, but from the idea of having to personally take the life of a loved one in pain.
The performances on screen are pretty good. Abigail Breslin’s Maggie is a soft-spoken and relatable teen, and Arnold delivers a quiet, understated, and surprisingly emotional turn as Wade. Going against type really works for Arnold, and he captures every moment he’s on screen, as only this Adonis can. However, Wade is not the main character; despite the trailer’s insistence otherwise, it is the titular Maggie. Her wandering through her home, observing close family and friends as they prepare to say goodbye, and dealing with the trauma of having been attacked, are the real core of this story. Many will find this boring, and the film does move at a slow, deliberate pace. Reviews coming out of festivals were positive, generally coming from art-house film fans and critics. If you have a deep appreciation for leisurely paced, introspective character dramas about families and dealing with mortality, then you have a winner in Maggie. If not, you’re better off watching the frantic and fun Dead Snow 2 again.
Personally I enjoyed it, and Maggie will be a fine addition to my Arnold film collection (I own them all to date!), though I would gladly see him in a large scale zombie killing splatter-fest as well. Perhaps one day…
Maggie is now available on Amazon Instant and in select theaters in the US, and will hit screens in the UK July 17th.