Metacritic-Rezensionen

Think of this witty, economically gory little tour de force as "28 Days Later" written by linguist Noam Chomsky.

Primarily though, the film works as a tour de force for McHattie--a veteran character actor making the most of his character’s long, fluid monologues--and as a sly commentary on journalistic responsibility.

A horror flick that's all talk and (almost) no action? The risk pays off better than you'd think.

Pontypool doesn't jell--its pretensions way exceed its reach--yet it's madly suggestive, and it rekindled my affection for the genre.

A small Canadian horror film that makes the most of its minuscule budget.

The premise has potential, but there's no follow- through. And there's no actual zombie mayhem; we learn everything secondhand -- from phone calls to the station.

Efficient enough to attract a cult audience.

A zombie flick sans bite.

For a film about the perils of too much talk, there's quite a lot of babbling presented as profundity. The political statements in Pontypool, much like those in another recent Canadian offering, Atom Egoyan's trite terrorism hand-wringer "Adoration," seem all the less provocative for appearing several years too late--McDonald's film might have had more punch if it were released when Bluetooth first rolled out.

Pontypool is something like a claustrophobic, locked-in-the-barn zombie movie, only almost without zombies.