Army of the Dead (2021)

After a zombie outbreak (of ragers and shamblers) in the city, Las Vegas has been quarantined, surrounded by a wall of construction containers. There’s also some business about a refugee camp surrounding the city that seems very much like the film (rightfully) sticking it to ICE. The – most probably very orange – president of the US has decided to finally just nuke the city, just in time for the 4th of July.

Shady billionaire Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada) hires zombie war hero turned diner cook Scott Ward (Dave Bautista) for a little project that really needs to happen before the end of Vegas: secretly – and highly illegally – getting rather a lot of money out of a casino vault.

Scott’s team is going to consist of old friends and partners as well as the mandatory wild cards. As with all heists, problems arise: Scott’s estranged daughter (Ella Purnell) tags along to rescue a friend from the city, there’s treachery in the ranks (committed by exactly the guy everyone expects to betray them), and the zombies turn out rather less mindless than they should be; also Frank Frazetta fans.

How much or how little one likes Zack Snyder’s Netflix zombierama Army of the Dead will probably depend on one’s willingness to survive the huge amounts of self-indulgence on display. This is most definitely a film made by a guy who’d be the wacky one in a comedy act, desperately needing a straight person in the editing room to say no to him. Because there’s nobody of that description around, Snyder puts whatever the hell he thinks is cool into the film, if it’s good for the movie as a whole or not. This certainly leads to a film that’s going to surprise a viewer quite regularly – sometimes with how daft Snyder is actually getting, at other times causing admiration for pretty much the same thing. It’s not terribly good for the film as a dramatic unit, lending everything a stop and start pacing as well as lacking focus.

On the plus side, this also makes Army of the Dead a film that’s very seldom boring, full as it is of genuinely cool zombie world building, a Siegfried and Roy tiger gone very right indeed, visual homages to Frank Frazetta, and a tendency to in turns completely lean into genre tropes, in others to playfully and very consciously go out of the way to not fulfil them.

Tonally, the film’s all over the place, turning from the goofiest low brow humour imaginable to perfectly serious attempts at character work at the drop of a hat, apparently relishing idiotic jokes and needlessly deep back stories equally, clearly following the maximalist rule that when much is good than too much can only be better. Really, it’s a cheesy metal cover made movie, often actually as cool as it believes to be, at other times so dumb it is rather charming.

In between the veritable shower of the very very dumb and the actually rather pointlessly clever, Snyder has also packed quite a few great action scenes. In fact, in the hands of filmmakers willing to set themselves some limits, decide which of four films happening at the same time they are actually trying to make, and focus on making it, this could have been one of the great action horror movies. In practice, Army of the Dead is a whole lot of fun and deeply stupid as well as clever ideas thrown into a mixer and then shot by a guy who does know how to make any old crap look slick. Is it a “good” movie? Probably not, but it’s so entertaining in its lack of inhibitions and so full of its director’s personal obsessions, it certainly is a very fun one indeed. Depending on the day you had, that can be quite a bit better than a good one.