Why 'Maggie' may be a turning point for Arnie...

The very near future and a blight of America's mid-West crops has led to an off-shoot into the human population... a condition that causes necrotic destruction of tissue, eventually leaving sufferers to become violent and then merely a shuffling shadow of their former selves.

Wade Vogel (Arnold Schwarzenegger) drives to the city to collect his daughter Maggie (Abigail Breslin). She's infected, but as the process is a slow one and she poses no immediate danger to those around her, Vogel pulls a few strings to delay her entry into Quarantine - the ill-equipped hospitals that are serving more like poor-mans' hospices.

Vogel is warned he only has a couple of weeks left with her before he must return her, but as the day draws near, both Maggie and Wade try desperately to hold on to shreds of a normal life and the fading moments they have together, determined she will never go back to Quarantine whatever happens next...

Any generic expectation you may have of a film spawned from a pitch that includes the words 'Schwarzenegger' and 'zombies' is likely to be quickly impaled when watching the Austrian Oak's latest offering. 'Maggie' is about as far from a summer feel-good actioner as one is likely to get. It is cold, bleak and possibly the best film Arnie has made in a considerable while, though with the lazy plotting of the recent Terminator outing, that might be damning with faint praise.

The film is a character-study about people facing the end of the world, not with a bang but a slow whimper of sour-smelling decay and the even more putrid, the loss of hope. Its DNA has more in common with the quieter, fear-tinged mundane moments of The Walking Dead and books such as Ella Etc: The Fall., as we examine how a drastic change can affect ordinary people in profound, fundamental but everyday ways.

In Maggie, Arnold isn't facing a problem that he can solve with a bad quip and a shotgun (though to be fair, the film has some scenes where the latter proves handy). Instead, he is a weathered farmer who's seen his crops blighted and then his family fractured by the news that his beloved daughter has a death sentence.

This is Schwarzenegger at his most restrained, in a film that is so brittle that occasionally it feels as if rigor-mortis has already taken hold and is working its way through the spine.. Arnold's Wade Vogel is a character of few words but with the weathered look of tired experience haunting every emotion that passes across his face. Atypically cast, it's a brave choice and though one can think of other actors who could have done just as well without raising a sweat, the very fact that the action hero has put this on his resumé  at all, wins him some respect. Like Sylvester Stallone in Copland, it's unlikely to signify a consistent change of direction from the normal fare, but it makes one wish all the more that it could be. 

Sometimes bittersweet, sometimes lethargic,sometimes merely depressing, it's not a perfect film and one could do with picking up the pace, but Henry Hobson shoots proceedings in an effective way and divines solid and emotional  performances not just from Schwarzenegger but also the highly effective and talented Abigail Breslin (as the titular Maggie) and the often under-appreciated Joely Richardson as Wade's wife.

Not to everyone's tastes, with an uneven pacing and with an ending played out in a way that won't satisfy everyone... this is still a worthy, if flawed, independent feature that tries hard to say something about the unmentionables of life and death and becomes a study in stillness worth some moments of your time...