A deja vous helping of zombie comedy

Zombieland: Double Tap breaks little new ground and that may be just what the movie's fans want.

If you've seen the first Zombieland, you've pretty much seen the second.

Zombieland: Double Tap arrives 10 years after the release of the first movie with the original zombie- fighting crew offering the same brand of humor that made the first movie a hit. This isn't necessarily a bad thing.

If you've been hankering to see Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, and Abigail Breslin reprise their roles as destroyers of zombies, Double Tap delivers.

Of course, a few new faces have been added, notably a funny Zoey Deutch as the most cheerfully clueless blonde to hit the screen in a long time.

Those who care should know that the quartet of remaining humans from the first movie is still threatened by hordes of zombies, brain-eating creatures that began spreading after the world was struck by some sort of virus.

Early on, Eisenberg's Columbus, Harrelson's Tallahassee, Stone's Wichita, and Breslin's Little Rock take refuge in a devastated White House. After a bit of plot maneuvering, Little Rock hits the road with a guitar-playing hippie who appropriates Dylan songs. Little Rock evidently is headed for Graceland, the equally devastated home of the late Elvis Presley.

The trio of survivors (along with Deutch's Madison) follows, maybe for no other reason than to give the movie somewhere to go. The journey provides an opportunity for Rosario Dawson to enter the fray. Dawson's Nevada presides over the Hound Dog hotel, home of Elvis memorabilia and facsimiles of Graceland's garish rooms. At this point, Luke Wilson and Thomas Middleditch show up to play odd replicas of the characters portrayed by Harrelson and Eisenberg.

It's as if Columbus and Tallahassee meet themselves and, thus, are confronted by their own ridiculousness -- or something like that.

Ruben Fleischer, who also directed the first installment, keeps the proceedings zipping along, moving fast enough to fly over the bits that don't work.

Those who find the movie superfluous won't be wrong, but there are enough laughs to combat resistance, perhaps even among those who've already seen enough zombie-apocalypses to last a lifetime.

Besides, Double Tap passes in an acceptable 99 minutes, leaving many smashed zombie heads and a whole lot of silliness in its wake.

Godzilla stomps through a chaotic movie

A surfeit of creatures can't make King of the Monsters into something to care about..

Loud, chaotic and repetitive, Godzilla: King of the Monsters suffers from a script that puts three creatures into a monster traffic jam that jars any hope of coherent storytelling off its moorings.

The monsters, in no special order, are Mothra, Godan, and Godzilla. As it turns out, these titans (as they're referred to in the movie) offer the last hope for saving the Earth, which has been ravaged by humans. But before the monsters can launch their world-saving, environmentalist mission, another monster must be vanquished, a three-headed dragon called Ghidorah.

The humans in the movies take sides -- sort of. One side -- led by Mark Russell (Kyle Chandler), a father who sank into dereliction after the death of his son in the previous installment, wants to kill the monsters. The other side is led by Dr. Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga), Mark's ex-wife. She wants to employ the monsters to save a world in which humans teeter on the edge of extinction.

To achieve her goal, Emma has thrown in with Jonah Alan (Charles Dance), a military man who has become an eco-terrorist; he's willing to pay a large price to save the world.

Madison Russell (Mille Bobby Brown), daughter of Mark and Emma, vacillates between the two approaches, as the movie bounces off one destructive set piece after another, none of them benefiting from anything resembling a well-staged buildup.

Other actors include Ken Watanabe, Sally Hawkins, Thomas Middleditch and David Straitharn, all of whom are swallowed -- not by monsters -- but by a screenplay that seems to have been eaten by the monsters, spit out as indigestible and then reassembled in ways that allow for dialogue that might have been fun had anyone bothered to deliver it with anything resembling a campy spirit.

As a result, Godzilla: King of the Monsters amounts to a collection of entirely forgettable performances.

The movie's big brain lodges in Farmiga's character: Dr. Russell is working on ORCA, a tacky looking electronic gizmo that can be used to communicate with the monsters by employing sonar or some such. If she's able to find the correct frequency she can calm the monsters, soothing their fire-breathing spirits.

The movie's high points all involve the mammoth creatures. The birth of Mothra, for example, reveals her glowing, elegant wings. Say what you will about Rodan, he knows how to make an entrance: He blasts out of a volcano.

Impressive in size, Godzilla doesn't have a particularly expressive countenance, and Ghidorah's three heads might productively have spent time talking to one another. Maybe they could have brought some much-needed coherence to a project that loads up on action involving battling monsters. These fights, splayed across ravished urban landscapes, aren't especially distinguished, but they're really all this Michael Dougherty-directed movie has to offer.

For some, that may be enough. Warner Brothers has more of these monster mashes on the way. Maybe next time, they'll add some things that this one seems to lack, human characters about whom we might actually care and action that raises the pulse instead of drubbing us into indifference. Look, they're fighting again. Sigh.

No medal for this profane comedy

A classic one-joke movie, The Bronze offers a few chuckles, but can't overcome the unpleasantness of its main character, a one-time Olympic gymnast (Melissa Rauch) whose career stalled with a Bronze medal. Years later, Rauch's Hope Ann Greggory has become an embittered, profanity-spewing woman whose personality is stuck in adolescence, complete with an ever-present pony tale, carefully arranged bangs and a refusal to wear anything but her Olympic warmup suit. Working from a script co-written by Rauch and her husband Winston, director Bryan Buckley seldom gets past a stream of profane humor delivered by Rauch in clipped staccato bursts. The joke, of course, is that Hope Ann Greggory looks like a pert cheerleader, but curses like an unrepentant sailor. Unable to move on with her life, Hope lives with her father (Gary Cole), a mailman who tolerates her massively annoying assaults. The story shifts gears when Hope is asked to train a rising star (Haley Lu Richardson). Thomas Middleditch plays the owner of the aging gym where Hope trains Richardson's character; Sebastian Stan portrays the egotistical coach of the US women's gymnastics team. A sex scene staged like a gymnastic routine serves as a comic high point, but the movie ultimately does precisely what you expect; it sells out its nasty side for a bit of soggy redemption. The Bronze might have worked as a skit, but can't make the cut as a movie.