The result should appeal to Austen aficionados and horror hounds alike—which is not a sentence you get to write too often.

What is most impressive about the final film, adapted for the screen and directed by Burr Steers, is that it gets the Pride and Prejudice side of things right, and that's what matters most.

Tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt substantial audiences, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is in fact a moderately entertaining film, not deficient in old-fashioned costume drama when it pleases, nor in the power of being clever where it chooses, but awkward and unsatisfying.

The juxtaposition of courtship and violence is the film's one true coup, but Pride and Prejudice and Zombies still mistakes weaponry for agency.

Lumbering, lifeless, and—strange thing to say about a cadaver—almost entirely charmless. Almost entirely because both Lily James, as headstrong heroine Elizabeth Bennet, and Sam Riley, as her brooding suitor Mr. Darcy, make for a delightful onscreen pair.

The premise promised Regency class and Romero shocks. The results, though, are only intermittently entertaining, and a better adaptation of Austen than a monster mash.

The result is an odd, inconsequential but not entirely charmless misfire: an action-horror-comedy-romance with none of the first two and precious little of the third.

There's noise and movement, an all-out war, and the usual happy ending, but no real blood, no real life. And not much fun.

To put it in Austen terms: They will not have the pleasure of understanding what Steers is trying to do here.

This movie is so crushing mainly because it was made by obviously smart people who are trying to dumb themselves down, and there’s nothing more excruciating than that.