Not much. World War Z is your standard-issue generic blockbuster movie. Now that studios aren't as reliant on America to make boatloads of money, they appeal to a worldwide mass audience to make up all those dollar bills they throw around. The problem with that is when they try to appeal to everyone the end result can often be generic, appealing to no one. WWZ falls into this trap.
Brad Pitt is Dad-Man, a guy who used to do something important (I'm not sure it's ever said what), but who now wants to live the life with his wife and children. To its credit, not much time is wasted setting things up. As soon as the happy family is stuck in Philly traffic (you can tell it's Philly because it looks exactly like Glasgow) everything goes bananas. The initial chaos is one of the two scenes they used heavily in promotions, along with the scene in Israel.
In most zombie movies the action takes place after the breakout. What WWZ has going for it is that it's all about the mass chaos normally only spoken of in past tense. The one exception being the very beginning of Zach Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake. So there's that.
Soon Pitt and his family are brought aboard a battleship where survivors are being temporarily placed. He reluctantly goes out to find a cure by retracing where the plague began. In between his globe trotting we are treated to scenes of his wife (Mireille Enos, like I really needed to be reminded of The Killing) waiting for him to call her on a walkie talkie. She might as well be a bowl of oatmeal. In fact, a bowl of oatmeal would be an improvement. His wife represents the cliché where any movie that has a soldier in it must be required by law to include a scene where he talks to her and their newborn baby through Skype. Only now that boring cliché is spread out through an entire film.
And that's the problem WWZ has. Everybody is a blank. Pitt (and his female Israeli soldier sidekick who says maybe one word) moves from set-piece to set-piece, so the momentum is there, but it means nothing. Shit happens for the sake of shit happening.
Oh yeah, and it's tame as fuck. PG-13 is rarely a good sign for Horror, but they can get away with a lot these days. Or so I thought. The Walking Dead is one of the most popular shows on TV and it is far gorier than the almost entirely bloodless action found here. The action is so tame that it undermines the stakes.
Violence would've helped cover the bland characters at the very least.
