Army of the Dead

When it comes to filmmaker Zack Snyder, his works have an interesting history where he made his directorial debut with his Dawn of the Dead remake in 2005, with his following projects of Watchmen and 300 cementing his trademarks strengths and weakness that he would be identified with. He does a great job in terms of bringing great action visuals and some fascinating intro music sequences but is also known for having weak writing alongside being excessive in length and slow motion moments. His track record is very hit or miss with surprising successes with 300 and Dawn of the Dead as well as failures like Sucker Punch. This brings us to a new entry for this unfocused filmmaker with, Army of the Dead, which is a return to non-comic book films after a decade (Sucker Punch was his last one before Man of Steel, 300: Rise of an Empire doesn't count as he only co-written that). This made it's debut on Netflix recently and after my bad luck with a streaming movie earlier that week, I was hoping for something dumb but fun. After watching on the day I received my 2nd Covid vaccine shot, I had a decent time with it but recognized the filmmaker needs more experience to fine tune is blatant creative issues. 

What's it about? Taking place after zombie infested Las Vegas gets quarantined, the story follows of a group of soldiers getting hired into pulling a heist in that area before it gets nuked by the government. The best way to describe the execution is that it encompasses everything that's known about him here. The narrative is aiming for classic B-movie action territory where his cinematography shines between an amazing music intro sequence and zombie battles. After being patient with about 40 minutes of setting up the crew and simplified exposition, the fights against the undead are very fun to watch between tense creative parts and wild guns. The zombies here are creatively different blending in hierarchies of the creatures between simple normal slow types and the commanding dominant rulers. 

On the flip side, this film carries a lot of the weakness the filmmaker is best known for in the screenplay. As a result of having too many people in that group, the characters are one dimension archetypes lacking in the emotional investment so it attempts to rely on actors to try and makeup for it. The plot is very predictable in its approach and it doesn't help that the dialogue isn't good either. As for the movies runtime, it wasn't an issue at first as for the most part is was going by smoothly but near the end it was really dragging on hard. A big reason for that is an unnecessary annoying subplot that is empty and only exists to add 15 minutes of padding to the length. If that subplot was removed, the score I'm giving it could have been increased a bit. The lack of focus in the screenplay simply does very little with the many characters on-screen (disservices some of them).  

 

How are the actors? In regards to story importance, the actor to focus on is Dave Bautista. Out of everyone in the cast, Dave gives the best performance in showcasing his range well enough for this genre and is given more opportunities in his role to actually care about than anyone else. Honorable mentions Omari Hardwick and Samantha Win due to the former contributing a decent amount of charismatic energy in his scenes while the latter deserves a shoutout mainly for her standout zombie fight. Dishonorable mentions go to Ella Purnell and Huma Qureshi for being the most unnecessary additions to the cast with contributing very little to their respective roles and being the weakest performances.

 

Overall Consensus: Army of the Dead brings enough fun zombie action, great visual direction, and decent acting that's attempts to offset the blatant unfocused screenplay and runtime problems. ⭑⭑⭑1/2 Runtime: 2 hour 28 minutes R

 

Reasons to watch it: You are a fan of the aforementioned actors and/or director Zack Snyder. You don't mind formulaic cliched characters lacking development. You want dumb wild undead fights. You are interested to see how this compares to Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake. 

 

Reasons to avoid it: You aren't a fan of the aforementioned actors and/or director Zack Snyder. You are bored formulaic cliched characters lacking development in a predictable story. You aren't in the mood for something that's style over substance. Zombies and gore scare you too much.