Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Zack Snyder
Starring: Dave Bautista, Ella Purnell, Omari Hardwick, Ana de la Reguera, Theo
Rossi, Matthias Schweighöfer, Nora Arnezeder, Hiroyuki Sanada, Tig Notaro,
Garret Dillahunt
Zack Snyder is one of the most Marmite filmmakers working today.
While many find his work shallow and immature, he has amassed a legion of
fans who exert so much power that they convinced Warner Bros to give
Snyder $80 million to complete his cut of
Justice League (though it likely helped that Warners wished
to distance themselves from the director who had replaced Snyder, Joss
Whedon, subject of various abuse allegations). I have to admit I'm in the
former camp when it comes to Snyder, though I do have a fondness for his
directorial debut, his 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead. That movie is the best of the crop of remakes of classic '70s and '80s
American horrors that emerged in the noughties, and it's still the best of
the wave of zombie movies it, along with Danny Boyle's
28 Days Later, kicked off.
Since then however, Snyder has become a byword for shallow, excessive
cinema. His films are known for their indulgent use of slow motion,
quasi-fascistic worldview, cardboard characters and the most clichéd
needle drops imaginable. If Snyder's return to the zombie genre with
Army of the Dead suggested he might replicate the success of
his debut, any hope is extinguished by the time the credits roll with, you
guessed it, a painfully long slo-mo sequence accompanied by the most
obvious needle drop you could employ for a movie set in Las Vegas.
The zombie genre has been done to…well, death at this point, so it's hard
to imagine any filmmaker could find a way to resuscitate its shambling
corpse at this point. Admittedly, Snyder does give us something I don’t
recall seeing before – a zombie heist movie. But
Army of the Dead adds nothing to the zombie genre, and even
less to the heist movie.
As detailed in a prologue, which ultimately stands as the movie's high
point, a zombie secretly transported by the military through the Nevada
desert breaks free and makes its way to Vegas. One of Snyder's de rigueur
slo-mo credits sequences then shows us the resulting chaos in Sin City,
with zombie showgirls, zombie Elvis impersonators and zombie gamblers
running amok. So bad is the situation that the government walls off Vegas
and plans to nuke the city at sunset on the fourth of July. If such an
idea hints at some biting, anti-authoritarian satire of the Romero school,
think again, as Snyder has no such intentions beyond delivering a lot of
carnage.
When ex-mercenary Scott (Dave Bautista) is approached by shady
billionaire Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada) and offered $50 million to
enter Vegas and retrieve $200 million from a casino vault, he accepts what
might be a suicide mission and assembles a crack squad to pull off the
mission.
In some quarters, Snyder has been likened to a second-rate Michael Bay.
This leads me to do something I never thought I would – I'm going to
defend Michael Bay! Like Bay's Armageddon, Army of the Dead is essentially a "guys (and gals) on a
mission" movie. Both films feature that classic trope of assembling the
team, but how the two filmmakers detail this is telling. In
Armageddon, Bay does so through a quick montage that gives us details about the
various team members through snippets of action. With Army of the Dead, Snyder resorts to a series of dull scenes in which Scott approaches
each team member and engages in a blandly staged conversation.
This is endemic of Army of the Dead, which save for the odd action sequence, could be mistaken for an
episode of any of the many zombie-themed TV shows of the past decade. With
Snyder doubling as cinematographer, it's the most visually uninspired
movie of the director's career. Say what you will about Snyder, but at
least his movies usually look like movies (even if they don’t move like
movies), which isn't the case for most of Army of the Dead. There's no sense of scale here, in terms of both the geography of the
setting and the task our heroes face. We're initially told that Vegas is
crawling with the undead, but once inside its walls they seem suspiciously
few and far between, not so much an army as a platoon. Similarly, it's
difficult to figure out how far from their goal they are at any given
point.
Guys (and gals) on a mission movies rely heavily on colourful characters –
think the misfits of Kelly's Heroes or
The Dirty Dozen, or the over-the-top meatheads of Predator and
Aliens – but the heroes of Snyder's film have no discernible
personalities, distinguishable only by their tattoos and level of
eyeshadow. The closest to an actual character is German safecracker Dieter
(Matthias Schweighöfer), but that's just because he's the only one
who acknowledges how crazy the mission is. The usual witty repartee you
expect of such characters is replaced by jokes that are stretched and
strained to breaking point – I didn't laugh once.
When it comes to horror movies, less is usually more. A babysitter stalked
by a masked boogeyman will always be more terrifying than a crew of
musclebound mercenaries battling a zombie horde, because a babysitter is a
relatable figure and one we fear for. It's difficult to have the same
anxiety for an ex-wrestler wielding a machine gun, no matter how many
zombies might be charging towards him. As such,
Army of the Dead simply doesn't function as a horror movie, and as an action movie
it lacks sufficient creativity and craziness.
There's very little here we haven't seen before, and if we have seen it
before it's been in superior movies like
Aliens, Trespass, Ghosts of Mars and
Dawn of the Dead (yes, both the Romero and Snyder cuts).
When Snyder drops The Cranberries' 'Zombie' in the climax, we're left
wondering if he isn't simply doubling down and playing a cruel joke on us.
Army of the Dead is on Netflix now.
