I'm not familiar with Jane Austen's novel, the only things I knew about it were the fact Jane Austen wrote it and it had a character called Mr. Darcy but I'm going to assume that the only thing this movie has in common with the novel is in fact the names of the characters. Mr Darcy, played by Sam Riley, is a zombie hunter of sorts and Lily James who plays Elizabeth Bennett is one of a group of sisters trained in the art of zombie execution, they must band together to save Britain from the hordes of undead that threaten their existence.
I wasn't familiar with the director, Burr Steers but a quick Flixster search led me to the fact that he had a part in Pulp Fiction and his previous directing gigs included the two Zac Effron Vehicles 17 Again and Charlie St Cloud, not necessarily someone you would trust with a zombie movie but I guess they wanted to try and keep it light hearted and throw in some romance but that's where these movies fall down, you never quite now what genre they're trying to be and the pieces don't quite fit the puzzle.
Apart from it's obvious high production values I couldn't find much to enjoy in this movie, the zombie action was sparse and boring and given all the melee weapons on show we rarely see anything other than the undead having their heads blown clean off with a shot gun. Matt Smith was thrown in to try and add some humour to proceedings but his jokes fell flat and other big names such as Lena Headey were just going through the motions. I got totally lost in the plot, not because it was complex but because it couldn't hold my attention, there was something about the 4 horsemen of the zombie apocalypse which sounds cool in theory but never came to much more than a cool painting on the wall.
Overall this movie promised so much and delivered nothing, it could have been saved by some cool zombie kick ass action but it just towed the line all the way to the lacklustre finally. Seems there was a thing for these kind of mash-up movies in the late 2000's, Abe Lincoln Vampire Hunter being the one that springs to mind but I'm glad this trend seems to have died a death already. So, unless your going to give me Freddy v Jason v Ash lets leave it there.