Army of the Dead

Army of the Dead

After the Zack Snyder’s director’s cut of “Justice League’ released last week on HBO Max, this week Netflix premieres Snyder’s “Army of the Dead,’ which hits select theaters tomorrow, May 12th. You can’t call a zombie movie anything “…of the Dead” without inviting comparisons to George A. Romero, whose 2004 remake of “Dawn of the Dead” was helmed by Snyder. So does this one live up to that taut horror remake or anything Romero himself made?

Yes and no. There are parts of this tightly conceived and executed (mostly in the “zombie headshots” department) aggressive action extravaganza that work; there are also themes that feel muddled and characters that are incredibly thin yes, even for a movie like this where character is rarely a strong suit. Still, it delivers on what it promises in its title, which may be enough for those looking for a new action movie or just Snyder fans who’ve been waiting for his return to the genre since his debut feature, 2004’s “Dawn of The Dead.”

“Army of the Dead’ opens with a clever scene involving a military transport colliding with a pair of newlyweds “celebrating” their marriage while driving down a Nevada highway; some dialogue tells us that they’ve recently left Area 51 and that their cargo is so dangerous that even their military-grade weapons won’t do much good against it; when the container holding whatever that thing is gets damaged and opened during the crash, all but one soldier are quickly turned into zombies before climbing up a hill towards Las Vegas.

To an obligatory cover version (in this case, Richard Cheese doing “Viva Las Vegas’) over slow-motion establishing shots of post apocalyptic destruction topless zombie showgirls eating guys in bathtubs; zombies playing with casino chips on slot floors; military evac choppers taking off as soldiers fire on the infected mob below we meet our main players, including Ward (Dave Bautista), Cruz (Ana de la Reguera) and Vanderohe (Omari Hardwick), three sharpshooting soldiers who have a lot of luck.

Although they’ve all gone back to blue collar jobs after escaping the city while the government figures out what to do about the fact that there’s now a zombie king running a casino called Olympus.

This is why Ward listens when a rich man named Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada) comes to him with an offer. There’s $200 million sitting in a vault under Las Vegas. Assemble a team, grab the cash and get out before the government nukes the city and you can keep $50 million of it. Ward reunites with Cruz and Vanderohe, and the three then assemble their own ‘Ward’s 11,’ including an expert safecracker (Matthias Schweighöfer), a viral personality (Raúl Castillo), a helicopter pilot (Tig Notaro, seamlessly replacing Chris D’Elia, who shot the film and then was replaced by reshoots), one of Tanaka’s men (Garret Dillahunt), and eventually even his own daughter Kate (Ella Purnell). Other faces will pop up, including a scene-stealing coyote (Nora Arnezeder) and an abusive officer (Theo Rossi). Most of them will end up zombie food. (That’s only a spoiler if you’ve never seen a zombie movie. Sorry.)

For as long as it is, “Army of the Dead” is actually quite lean Snyder has effectively grafted the heist genre onto the zombie one. The script that Snyder co-wrote with Shay Hatten and Joby Harold has just enough new in both departments although I wish there was more to the heist itself than A to Z(ombie) through B(ack) to A again but sometimes it feels like the plot of “Army of the Dead” is just something for zombies to run around on instead of something clever on its own. I kept waiting for a twist or surprise that never really came.

It also would have helped if this lack of invention in storytelling were balanced by more interesting characters but these are some shallow people even by zombie-action standards. You can describe almost every character in this movie in no more than three words, max. Ward is a father, chef and soldier that’s all I know about him, that’s all anybody knows about him.

Bautista does his best to make him feel three-dimensional but De la Reguera and Hardwick have almost nothing to work with at all. Supporting players start stealing focus from the straight faced leads simply by giving the film some energy, particularly Dillahunt, Schweighöfer and Arnezeder, who are all great. But why not punch it up a bit? Romero’s sake, some of these zombies have more personality than the humans do here.

Another thing is that Snyder appears to be manipulating political and current events themes without really commenting on them much. Walls dividing people so much a team needs a coyote to get back into an American city? That’s inherently of the moment by way of the hot buttons it pushes, and you can’t look at someone getting temperature-checked and not think about the state of the world (even if that was obviously impossible for Snyder to foresee). But the problem is that they don’t add up to anything.

They’re flavor instead of ideas, which is downright anti-Romero considering how willing the master was to just go straight at things like dead-eyed consumerism or the military industrial complex in “Day of the Dead” or “Dawn of the Dead.” It’s not necessarily that “Army of the Dead” needed those elements in order to work, but it’s frustrating to dangle them in front of this story only for them not to go anywhere.

So what does work about “Army of the Dead”? It’s fun and unpretentious, driven more by its action set pieces than anything else. It owes as much debt to modern “fast zombie” movies like “World War Z” or “28 Days Later” as it does to Romero, and there are moments where its grand insanity just clicks because of its filmmaker’s set-piece ambition meeting his cast’s willingness to go wherever he tells them.

An unforgettable zombie tiger; a weird kind of undead king/queen dynamic that shapes the action; a great sequence involving brain-eaters being used to spring booby traps these are fun, clever beats that keep “Army of the Dead” alive. There are just enough of them here to hold this thing together even if it’s another spin or two shy from winning any jackpots.

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