Directed by:
Zack SnyderCinematography:
Zack SnyderComposer:
Tom HolkenborgCast:
Dave Bautista, Ella Purnell, Omari Hardwick, Ana de la Reguera, Theo Rossi, Matthias Schweighöfer, Nora Arnezeder, Hiroyuki Sanada, Garret Dillahunt (more)VOD (1)
Plots(1)
After a zombie outbreak in Las Vegas, a group of mercenaries takes the ultimate gamble by venturing into the quarantine zone for the greatest heist ever. (Netflix)
Videos (2)
Reviews (14)
What happened to the Zack Snyder who gave us Watchmen and Dawn of the Dead? It feels like success went to his head because making a mashup of a zombie massacre with an Ocean’s Eleven-style heist is a pretty wild move—even for a Hollywood director. And if I had to pick someone to pull it off, Zack would’ve been the obvious choice. But the brutally overlong runtime, average performances (even Dave Bautista could’ve been better), and a dull, uninspired script that brings nothing new, made this film a chore to sit through. The relentless action just highlighted how tiresome the whole thing was. I couldn’t help but compare it to Shaun of the Dead, which set the standard for zombie flicks. Army of the Dead lacked tight editing, a solid soundtrack (the ending didn’t save it, even if it was flashy), and, most importantly, a cast you could really root for.
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So sloppy, it's like nobody was trying very hard with Army of the Dead. The characters are so uninteresting that I didn't care what order they died in, the actors have no charisma or nothing to work with, and the first really interesting and entertaining action scene3 doesn't come until sometime at the beginning of the last quarter. Once they start shooting and slashing properly, it's quite fun, with Snyder keeping himself in check, so there aren't nearly enough of those slow-motion sequences to make it boring, it's just that there's about an hour of completely unnecessary ballast that is boring, where the most entertaining thing is how it all makes no sense at all. Sure, in a B-action flick, that shouldn't really matter, it's just that Army of the Dead may be a B-movie, but it really isn’t. There's climactic brutality , it only falls into the horror category because there are zombies. And Snyder's playing with the camera, which often leads to ugly visuals full of out-of-focus shots (which was supposedly the artistic intent), is more annoying than effective. I don't know. An hour after the closing credits, I can recall virtually nothing of it. Just that I was expecting a lot more than another routine Netflix movie, and I really didn't have those expectations particularly high. An unimaginative and boring waste of time.
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An unreasonably overblown runtime and a quantum of Snyder’s love it or hate it style in a solid (read through and through bland) unacknowledged adaptation of “Dead Rising 2”. It actually works quite well as a tired C-rated video game adaptation, but not so well as a zombie heist B-movie that plays with the rules of the genre. It undeniably has its strong moments and scenes (marred by shaky camerawork), but there are fewer than one would expect from the self-proclaimed king of "tinsel cool" on a project where he had a free hand.
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Army of the Dead is colossal trash with annoying characters and tasteless blurring of the image behind them. However, it holds the viewer’s attention because there are enough pleasing things in the movie for fans of the genre. The awkward viewing experience is also salvaged to some extent by Bautista, who is not only a mountain of a man but also has a powerhouse personality, and a zombie tiger that could devouor Ang Lee’s schmaltz in a single gulp!
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I think I could enjoy a stupidly scripted zombie horror B-movie, but in this case most of my disappointment stems from the fact that there was no ambition whatsoever to make anything resembling horror. The tone is just overstuffed action nonsense that happens to feature zombies, and I was also surprised at how ugly it looks in many sequences. Moreover, such a banal film, which narratively and conceptually does not bring anything original and interesting, cannot be two and a half hours long for God's sake! You could throw away 45 minutes without any problem. Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead is on another league and I’m afraid we will never see anything like it again from Zack.
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