ARMY OF THE DEAD (2021) – Ocean 11 meets the Living Dead in Vegas

Fresh from his Justice League director’s cut, Zack Snyder is back with another major release. A two and a half hours zombies movie that he writes, directs, and produced as a Netflix original. In a way, Army of the Dead is like having Snyder return to his roots as he did start off his film making career with a remake of the Dawn of the Dead in 2004. I have to admit that after the epic Justice League, I had my expectations way up for this one. Army of the Dead had so much potential going for it to become a kick ass zombies blod fest but alas, for me, this one missed the target.

The key problem I had with this was probably the story line. It appears to be more Ocean 11 than Dawn of the Dead with its main storyline about gathering a suicidal team to carry out a dangerous heist in zombies infested Las Vegas. Too much time and focus was wasted in introducing the characters, non of whom were particularly interesting, which added no value to the flow and story. The team of idiots seem to be motivated by money and not survival as they did not appear at all concerned about the risks of the flesh hungry zombies that lie in their path. Not surprisingly, the fun parts of the film were those which did not involve the heist. This included a lengthy opening credits sequence which summarises the mayham and fall of Las Vegas, and introduced some of our key characters visually as they fought off the hordes of zombies. These scenes were very exciting and had some awesome zombies kill moments. In fact, I would say that that would have been THE movie we wanted to watch rather than what happened in the aftermath of the Las Vegas collapse.

Snyder also somehow felt it necessary to include a higher breed of zombies who are more intelligent and able to strategize and gang-up together for an attack, including a zombie tiger presumably one of the white tigers from the Vegas Siegfried and Roy show! So instead of the usual braindead zombies that we are used to, we have a bunch which seem to answer to their alpha zombie .. sort like the Night King of the zombies in The Game of Thrones. The action with zombies finally gets more involving towards the final act as our bunch of heisters try to battle their way out of the city before it gets nuked. Here is where Snyder shines and we get some cool Snyder slow motion action of the fights and zombie kills.

The film’s soundtrack also features a number of cool songs with lyrics that cleverly and crazily match the action on screen. These include some Elvis favourites, Culture Club’s Do You Really Want To Hurt Me, and The Cranberries’ Zombie! Snyder also choose to go a light hearted approach and thankfully without going overboard with the comedy element. Of the cast, muscle man Dave Bautista came through unscathed (performance wise). Despite the silliness of the material he manages to make his character display a surprising range of emotions. Particularly impressive was the scene of him stabbing his wife to death when she turned to a zombie. He is probably one actor who will go far in the muscled men action movie field in the likes of Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson.

Army of the Dead was a disappointment to me. I would have preferred to movie to have more direct zombies focus rather than having the heist of the century plot as its focus. It was also running to bit too long and might have benefited from a tighter run time. On the plus side, we did get some good zombies confrontations and Snyder’s trademark slow motion moves to spice things up, so this isn’t totally a lost cause.