In the opening credits of Zack Snyder’s newest feature Army of the Dead, you can nearly feel the director’s giddy smile stretching across the hedonistic melee. In Las Vegas, flesh-eating zombies are beginning to outnumber the casinos. And they’re consuming unsuspecting tourists just as quickly. Cannibalistic showgirls prowl for prey. Slot-machine junkies bundling up their remaining pittance dodge the newly infected. A dimwitted Elvis impersonator, wig askew, looks blankly over the carnage as the real Elvis Presley’s “Viva Las Vegas” plays in the background the zany bloodshed. It’s the rare instance where a film’s climax occurs in the first few minutes.
Following the unrestrained freakout, Snyder’s thriller dons the clothes of an epic heist flick: Months after the fall of Vegas, a rich hotel owner with government ties, Bly Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada), enlists a group of mercenaries to infiltrate the overrun sin city. In the basement of his former hotel sits $200 million worth of tax-free money, locked away in a nearly impenetrable safe. Leading the team is the hulking Scott Ward (Dave Bautista), who saved the Secretary of Defense from the Vegas catastrophe and earned a medal, but is now flipping burgers in a low-rent diner. He assembles a rag-tag group of former acquaintances and new faces for the mission, including his estranged daughter Kate (Ella Purnell), and together, they head out on what seems like a near-suicide mission. They have to secure the money within 48 hours, because the U.S. is about to drop a nuclear warhead on the forsaken city.
Army of the Dead‘s whopping 150-mintue runtime is short and tidy compared to Snyder’s 242-minute-long Justice League cut, but both films brim with wonderful concept, captivating scenery and set pieces, and great worldbuilding that shroud the earnest merits behind Snyder’s narrative: a parent/child relationship. But with quick-paced zombie fights, quicker-paced jokes, big guns, and even bigger personalities, Army of the Dead feels like Snyder’s attempt at making a Michael Bay movie. It’s a heist film, a war movie, and a zombie apocalypse movie all at once, but it all feels like one big passion project from Snyder.
This film represents Snyder’s second foray with the undead: Dawn of the Dead, his 2004 remake of the George Romero classic, is coincidently prescient about the events of 2020. In his remake, an unknown virus sweeps across the country, leading a disparate group of people to quarantine in a mall while the plague takes hold. Taking his cue from 28 Days Later, Snyder used fast-moving zombies as the primary fright. For Army of the Dead, he takes the next logical leap by crafting two types of flesh-eaters: Shamblers (the mindless kind) and Alphas (the highly advanced kind). An early scene shows a muscular, intelligent Patient Zero zombie escaping from an Area 51 transport convoy. Fast-forward to the film’s present day, and Vegas isn’t the leader-zombie’s prison, it’s the kingdom of his alphas. These creatures open the door for elaborate action sequences, visceral kills, and robust amounts of gore.
And just like the flesh-eaters, the large cast makes the film more intriguing, and their chemistry is a big improvement compared to Snyder’s other recent work. To carry out the operation, Ward first enlists his closest friends: the rough-and-tumble mechanic Maria Cruz (Ana de la Reguera); the philosophical, circular-saw-toting Vanderohe (Omari Hardwick), and the talkative helicopter pilot Marianne (Tig Notaro, who was green-screened into the completed film to replace Chris D’Elia after various allegations of sexual assault were levied against him). They’re joined by the zombie-hunting YouTube and Reddit sensation Mikey Guzman (Raúl Castillo), his friend Chambers (Samantha Win), and meek German safe-cracker Dieter (Matthias Schweighöfer). To keep tabs on the group, Tanaka adds his slimy head of security Martin (Garret Dillahunt). While it’s certainly a pretty packed ensemble cast of great actors with great personalities, the cast is a high point as no one really overshadows anyone else, and everyone gets the right amount of development and the right amount to shine.
But few people come to a Zack Snyder film for the performances. They pay for the cinematic escape. And Army of the Dead has plenty of it. Soft lenses capture a tattered American landscape littered with dried corpses and a disintegrating skyline. This setting serves as a large post-capitalist backdrop to a bevy of precise firefights. An almost distractingly brightly-colored highlight reel of cascading bullets and a spinning baseball bat, for example, sees the team imagining their kick-ass route toward the abandoned hotel. Other skirmishes take place in claustrophobic surroundings: One involves a maze of hibernating flesh-eaters. Another sees Bautista delivering precise headshots while running in slow motion across an island of roulette tables. Others take place in the sky, where a helicopter careens between dilapidated skyscrapers. And Snyder understands the tonality of a modern zombie film. Like Ruben Fleischer with Zombieland, the film seems to be yet again where the director’s trademarks work well extremely well with the genre. One laugh-out-loud moment involves a newscaster quoting the president on his decision to bomb Vegas on the 4th of July: “Really cool, and the ultimate fireworks show. Actually kind of patriotic, if you think about it.” But Snyder has also added a heartfelt tenor to his overembellished storytelling and dark humor, which works extremely well: the father/daughter relationship between Scott and Kate undergirds all the outsized gun fights, supplying the film with real-world heartache. Snyder also has Bautista, whose advanced sense of physicality is further translated into his quiet forlornness. More than a few scenes here are reminiscent of his stellar work as a soulful replicant in Blade Runner 2049. As he keeps doing films, his acting ability keeps increasing for sure.
Viewers’ mileage with the “zombie-heist-thriller-comedy” that is Army of the Dead will vary. There are multiple points where the languid pacing is felt, where we navigate through this bombastic caper with the slow-footedness of a coward in a minefield. It feels like there’s a slick 110-minute movie hiding in here, one that’s more focused on the paternal hurt driving Scott, along with the heist itself. But the parts of Snyder’s film are definitely stronger than the whole. But if you’re looking for a preposterous onslaught of blood and guts melded with sharp-tongued humor, then Army of the Dead is the big swinging zombie film of your fantasies.
3.5/5 STARS