MANILA, PHILIPPINES — An army of intelligent zombies roaming around Las Vegas. It’s a simple yet fun concept when you think about it. After all, so many motion pictures have had many takes on the zombie and undead genre over the decades, the time had come for something unique to set it apart from the rest. Director Zack Snyder, fresh off getting his version of Justice League released by Warner Bros. after the project had been seemingly cast aside by the studio, had come up with the idea for Army of the Dead as far back as 2007. It was only in 2019, however, that he got the go-signal to start working on his zombie movie.
When a U.S. military convoy crashes into a car, it unleashes a genetically engineered zombie who then proceeds to kill or infect the soldiers assigned to escort it. Making their way to nearby Las Vegas, Nevada, the zombies begin to infect thousands of residents and tourists who are visiting “Sin City.” Within a short period of time, the military tries to intervene in the city to no avail, leaving the U.S. government with little choice but to place it under quarantine.
Weeks later, former mercenary Scott Ward (Dave Bautista) is flipping burgers on the city’s outskirts when he is approached by casino owner Bly Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada) and his head of security, Matin (Garret Dillahunt). Tanaka wants Ward to assemble a team to recover $200 million from his casino within Las Vegas days before the military sends nuclear weapons to destroy the city. With the promise of a big payoff, Ward assembles his team including mechanic Maria Cruz (Ana de la Reguera), ex-soldier Vanderohe (Omari Hardwick), pilot Marianne Peters (Tig Notaro), and safecracker Ludwig Dieter, (Matthias Schweighofer) whose skills are needed to open the safe where the money is stashed.
After Ward’s estranged daughter Kate (Ella Purnell) directs her father to include Lily (Nora Arnezeder) who knows the city well, Kate insists on joining the team to save her friend who was left within the city walls. As Ward and his crew work their way into the heart of Las Vegas, Lily explains that an intelligent species of zombie known as Alphas are in charge of the other generic zombies and that they can perhaps be reasoned with to make their job easier.
Even as the lesser mindless “shamble” zombies continue to overrun Las Vegas, an alpha zombie called Zeus (Richard Cetrone) emerges as their leader complete with a queen (Athena Perample) as well as zombie horses and even a zombie tiger, further showing that the undead do not care who they infect and turn. With the countdown to the nuclear strike accelerated, time is running our for Ward and his crew to retrieve the money and survive this vision of a zombie apocalypse.
As mentioned earlier, the premise of Army of the Dead is simple enough and does not promise an intellectual discourse among the undead legions. Yet the film is plagued by many issues that proceed to take the fun out of that same promise, not the least of which is the lack of charisma of the actors cast to ideally draw empathy from its audience.
Dave Bautista spent years as a professional wrestler for World Wrestling Entertainment before becoming Drax the Destroyer in Guardians of the Galaxy and the Marvel movies, as well as turns in Blade Runner 2049 and as a Bond villain in Spectre. He supposedly turned down a role in James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad to play the lead here in Army of the Dead, but the sad truth of the matter is, he couldn’t carry this movie on his extremely broad shoulders. The subplot with his daughter was also an issue as it was completely unnecessary and was seemingly only added to insert some drama into the heist aspect of the film.
Assembling a crew for a heist should be a fun process as the audience is introduced to different characters as well as what they specialize in. That was the case in Ocean’s Eleven, The Italian Job, and even Inception. In each of those cases, the characters were compelling enough that their value in their respective heists became invaluable. In Army of the Dead, aside from Dieter and Lily, most of the crew is forgettable. The ambling pace of the film also hurts its watchability as it promised non-stop action but only really does so in small bursts.
If Zack Snyder’s Justice League was a triumph for the director as his vision for that piece was embraced by comic book fans even though the studio didn’t, Army of the Dead is a significant step back in what could have been the evolution of both the zombie film and the heist film. And that’s a shame.
