Maggie Movie Review – Schwarzenegger Like You Never Saw Him Before

Runtime: 95 minutes

Release Date: May 8, 2015

Rating: PG-13

Director: Henry Hobson

Wade lives in a not too distant future where an infection started and began spreading to other people. He lives with his daughter Maggie, second wife Caroline, and a little boy and girl who are either their kids or her kids, no one really explains that. Wade takes Maggie to the doctor, and we learn that while she has the infection, it's still in the early stages. The doctor sends them home with a warning to keep an eye on her.

It doesn't take long before Maggie starts acting a little weird. While swinging outside and remembering her mother, she goes a little crazy and breaks/bites her finger. Caroline worries that this is a sign she's changing, but Wade brushes it off like it's nothing. He later encounters two of the turned outside and has to kill them to protect his family. The police come by later to announce that one of his neighbors kept her family members locked up instead of notifying the authorities. They remind Wade that he must turn in Maggie when things get too bad.

It turns out that in this version of the zombie apocalypse, people are generally cool about it. Maggie even gets the chance to hang out with her friends one night. One of the other boys is infected, and when the other guys tease him about it, Maggie goes to support him and spend some time with him. Unfortunately, Maggie later finds the same boy at home with the police ready to pick him up and take him to quarantine. As the film progresses, Wade must find a way to keep his wife happy and protect his daughter at the same time.

Maggie is a very...strange movie? There's something about it that I just can't put my finger on. It's not that I didn't like it, but it's not like I did like it either. It's essentially a zombie movie or an infected apocalypse movie that doesn't play like one of those movies. Everyone seems to know exactly what to do to take care of the problem without actually taking care of the problem. They leave infected people out to roam the streets until they finally turn and then put them in a quarantined area.

The other issue is that the movie is just really slow. Things go at such a slow pace that I occasionally just wanted to shake the characters and tell them to do something. Even Maggie's transformation is completely gradual. There are a few things that show you something is off, including a black scab on her arm, black veins, and her eyes clouding over, but she acts totally normal. She still has a crush on a guy and still wants to do all the normal teenage things. Her friends don't even seem to have a problem with her, despite the fact that she could literally rip their faces off at any moment.

The one thing I can recommend is Schwarzenegger himself. Man, I never expected to see him in a movie like this, especially after watching his most recent films. He does an admirable job of playing a man torn between the two women in his life. When he takes his daughter to show her the garden growing over her mom's grave, I seriously almost teared up.

Though Maggie is kind of a zombie movie, it's not like any zombie movie I ever saw before. Given it's slow pace and dark tone, I'm still on the fence about how I feel.