Mag­gie

Since 2012’s The Expend­ables sequel Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger has – for bet­ter or worse – stuck to mak­ing the kinds of macho pop­corn movies that require him to mix it with com­bat­ive drug car­tels and cut­throat mercenaries.

Mag­gie, then, marks his first prop­er dra­mat­ic role since, well, ever. He plays a tac­i­turn Mid­west farmer named Wade Vogel whose epony­mous daugh­ter from a pre­vi­ous mar­riage (Abi­gail Bres­lin) is slow­ly turn­ing into a zom­bie. Wade’s new wife Car­o­line (Joe­ly Richard­son) is under­stand­ably less than impressed when he decides to res­cue Mag­gie from quar­an­tine, there­by putting the entire house­hold – includ­ing their two young chil­dren – at risk. But, as any­one who’s famil­iar with Arnie’s oeu­vre will attest to, some­times poppa’s got­ta do what a poppa’s got­ta do.

If you’re already buoyed by the prospect of Arnie show­ing off his seri­ous act­ing chops, it is with a heavy heart that we report that Mag­gie is a total bust. Imag­ine if mid­way through film­ing Inter­stel­lar, Christo­pher Nolan sud­den­ly lost inter­est in space/​time trav­el and decid­ed to reshoot the entire movie around the scene in which Matthew McConaughey’s Coop­er bids a teary adieu to his daugh­ter. No action, no excite­ment, just two-and-a-half grind­ing hours of cloy­ing Sophie’s Choice-style deci­sion mak­ing fol­lowed by a long, solemn embrace between a father and his child.

Mag­gie may be an inex­act approx­i­ma­tion of the hypo­thet­i­cal sce­nario pre­sent­ed above, but in unan­chor­ing itself from the genre to which it osten­si­bly sub­scribes, direc­tor Hen­ry Hob­son leaves us with a drab fam­i­ly melo­dra­ma in which the zom­bie apoc­a­lypse back­drop is pure­ly inci­den­tal. If it sounds like we’re bag­ging on Mag­gie on the grounds that it’s not the film we expect­ed to see, it’s worth not­ing that Hob­son spends the entire time des­per­ate­ly try­ing to con­vince us that this is any­thing oth­er than a hor­ror movie, despite the fact that it’s quite clear­ly a hor­ror movie.