It’s hard to make a good zombie film. You can have a talented auteur at the helm, a spectacular cast, and interesting approach to special effects, and even a great theme song and still wind up with an uninspiring end result. Which is unfortunately the case with The Dead Don’t Die.

It’s fair to say I wasn’t the only one with high expectations going into the theater. The Dead Don’t Die was written and directed by Jim Jarmusch, has done delightfully strange work tinged with horror in Only Lovers Left Alive and Dead Man. Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Iggy Pop, Tom Waits, Tilda Swinton, Chloe Sevigny, Steve Buscemi, and Danny Glover are the main ensemble. Sturgill Simpson wrote the theme song (and makes a cameo as the “guitar zombie”). That movie makes itself, right?

The premise – a deadpan (excuse the expression), self-referential zombie movie where the characters, or at least some of them, know they are in a movie – could have been fun. But around the time the fourth or fifth different character notes, “this is creepy” with dispassionate wonder, all of the potential joy evaporates. The parade of tropes commences. Strange things start happening in the small Pennsylvania town of Centerville. Officer Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver) has a running gag saying “this won’t end well,” which eventually gets on Chief Cliff Robertson’s (Bill Murray) nerves. Young hipsters (probably from Cleveland, notes Peterson) get lost and wind up having to stay in the local motel. Three kid in a correctional facility seem to be the only ones to connect the zombies with all of the reports on TV about climate change. Hermit Bob (Tom Waits), who never seems to be in any danger, watches from the woods. Each of these things feel like they roll onto the screen, look at the camera, and say, “Hey, I’m a trope. Weird, right?” And then shrug and move on.

There are a few good laughs in the film. RZA plays a delivery guy from WU-PS. The hotel owner jokes about the hipsters and their “irony,” which might be the best jab the script takes at itself. When the theme song comes on the radio, Robertson can’t figure out why it seems so familiar. Peterson knows. Because it’s the theme song, he says. It’s that extra half step that seems to damn the film. The fourth wall is cracked, but never completely broken. It’s not subtle, but Jarmusch doesn’t seem to want to really run with that idea and have fun with it.

Peterson knows a lot of what’s going to happen because, as he admits later, he’s read the script. That self-awareness is not a new premise. Luigi Pirandello did it onstage in 1921 with Six Characters In Search of An Author. Tom Stoppard did it on the stage and screen with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The Scream franchise was built on that engine. I don’t know that it has been applied to a zombie film, a sub-genre for which the rules are so familiar you wouldn’t even have to spend a lot of time establishing them before you start having the characters work against those expectations. In that regard, The Dead Don’t Die is all set-up and no punchline.

It does start to flow a bit better once the action starts to ramp up. The characters’ understated reactions are funnier when you can contrast them with their immediate, dire circumstances. That’s the tension the film is going for, and it was so close in reach that it can be maddening sometimes. Wiggins would have been disappointed. At least I think he would. We never really get to know him or anyone else, even oddball Scottish undertaker Zelda Winston (Tilda Swinton), whose eccentricities are most the most obvious of any of the characters. As a result, when they are facing their respective demises, I felt about ambivalent as they did about it.

I did enjoy the film’s visual sense. Hermit Bob seems to be the only one who sees the blue corona around the moon, the first tell that things are going wrong. And Jarmusch’s zombies don’t bleed so much as leak ashes when they are desecrated, which is effective in the scenes with the sword-wielding Winston.

Part of what makes horror-comedies like Shaun of the Dead work so well is a sense that the filmmakers really love their source material. There’s no sense of that in The Dead Don’t Die. There are a couple of nods to Romero (he’s even namechecked at one point), and a tacked on soliloquy about consumerism by Hermit Bob at the end, but no real excavation of the ideas he expressed in his films, only a lackluster acknowledgment of how they have become established in the mainstream, addressing the fifth or sixth generation down. Considering the people involved, I think I’d prefer to see a documentary on the making of The Dead Don’t Die than the movie itself. The joys of this premise and the chemistry of the cast and crew would likely be more evident there.