Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland: Double Tap opens just like the original did, with a voice-over from Jesse Eisenberg telling us all about zombies. But this time he seems genuinely surprised that we showed up. It’s been a decade since we met and fell in like with this quartet of quippy post-apocalyptic survivors, and in all that time there’s been no shortage of competition for our zombie-slaying entertainment dollars. It means a lot to him that we chose a sequel to Zombieland, and presumably – since we’re all here in the theater – it means a lot to us too.

But why, exactly, have we come back? It’s not because there’s more story to tell, or because the filmmakers had a new take on the zombie genre. We only seem to be back because we wanted to hang out with Columbus (Eisenberg), Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin) all over again. What have they been up to? Who have they killed lately? And are they still their same old endearing selves?

The answer to those questions is “not much for ten whole years,” “quite a lot of zombies” and “yes, they’re still delightful.” Zombieland: Double Tap doesn’t add much to their stories or characters but it’s fun to pop in while we’re in the cinematic neighborhood. And although it doesn’t have the same impact as the original Zombieland, the sequel is a fun place to visit.

Columbus, Tallahassee, Wichita and Little Rock spent the last few years squatting in the White House, purloining and vandalizing priceless heirlooms and building close family bonds. When Tallahassee gets overly protective of Little Rock, who’s a teenager now and eager to meet people her own age, and when Columbus pushes Wichita for a serious commitment, the ladies run off in the middle of the night to find their own path.

As solo adventures go, it’s short-lived. Little Rock quickly falls for a pacifist guitar player from Berkeley (Avan Jogia, Shaft) and ditches Wichita, who walks back home to find that Columbus is already on the rebound with a ditz named Madison (Zoey Deutch, Vampire Academy), who’s been hiding in a freezer for a decade and is desperate to be liked, loved and slept with.

With Little Rock on the run – with a pacifist no less, and without the means to defend herself – it’s up to the new quartet to venture across the country, find her, rescue her, and kill a whole lot of zombies in the process. Along the way, they come across a brand new strain of the undead which they quickly dub “The T-800,” because it’s nearly impossible to kill.

That’s the plot, and it’s just an excuse to get a bunch of characters who were smart enough to find secure shelter in the zombie apocalypse to leave the house and find themselves at odds with one another once more, and back in harm’s way. On paper it’s just contrivance but Eisenberg, Harrelson and Stone play it like a conservative family on a mission to rescue their teenaged daughter from the bad influence of an anti-2nd Amendment, pot-smoking hippie. Which is, if nothing else, a funny set-up for a zombie flick. It’s a little like if George Romero had directed an episode of Family Ties.

But it’s insubstantial, that’s for certain. Fortunately, this is a Zombieland sequel, not a Romero film, so we’re not exactly primed for thoughtful commentary. All that matters is that the ensemble cast we know and love find themselves in one wacky, violent, zombified situation after another, and that it’s funny. And it’s very, very funny. The script by original screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, along with newcomer David Callaham (Wonder Woman 1984), adds more of Columbus’s trademark rules and zombie kills so outlandish that no other zombie film would ever have okay’ed them, let alone made them work.

The best parts of Zombieland are the moments when the script segues into bizarre self-aware territory, like when the characters – who exist in the present day, if the zombie apocalypse happened a decade ago – encounter ideas and phenomena that flourished in our reality and never really caught on in their own. And the film does a full-on riff of Shaun of the Dead when Columbus and Tallahassee meet their full-on doppelgängers, in a sequence that segues from silly meta-humor to an ambitious one-take shot that’s as complicated as it is hilarious.

Zombieland: Double Tap is chock full of gut-busting, stomach-churning laughs. It’s just not likely to stick with you afterward. One can’t help but leave the theater, giggling, but wondering why it took ten years to revisit the characters, and why after all that time they didn’t have a more exciting new adventure to share with us. It’s a slight, likable reunion with characters we love, doing wacky things without taking themselves too seriously. Nothing more than silly zombie-killing entertainment but, more importantly, nothing less.