Zack Snyder’s ‘Army of the Dead’ Pummels You to Submission [Review]

After a while, I just couldn’t deal with Zack Snyder’s “Army of the Dead.” I tried, I really did. It starts off great, but then it goes on and on. The fact of the matter is, that unless you infuse some much-needed fresh DNA Into a zombie movie like in “28 Days Later,” then you won’t convince me that it’s a movie worth seeing.

And so, in Zack Snyder’s very long, and very violent, horror-thriller nothing new is brought into the genre. You don’t really care who survives. Set in Las Vegas, where a zombie outbreak has been contained by locking up the undead inside the strip, a billionaire hotel owner, Bly Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada), hires a crew of ragtag outcasts to get inside Vegas and retrieve $200 million stacked in his hotel safe.

Man-beast Dave Bautista leads the crew of mercenaries. He’s a burger flipper but wants to use the heist money to retire and open a lobster roll food truck. The rest of the team includes pilot Marianne (comic scene-stealer Tig Notaro), famous zombie slayer Mikey (Raul Castillo), Vanderohe (Omari Hardwick), Scott’s former flame Cruz (Ana De La Reguera), vault-cracker Ludwig Dieter (a hilarious Matthias Schweighofer), Lily (Nora Arnezeder), and Scott’s daughter Kate (Ella Purnell). All are, more or less, caricatures of other characters we’ve seen before in better, and more fleshed-out movies. Add in corrupt Martin (Theo Rossi), a scheming security chief sent in by Tanaka to monitor our crew, and you are bound to have some backstabbing.

And so, after a decent start, where Snyder has a blast introducing his film’s central plotting, we enter the Vegas hotel and that’s when the film goes downhill. We soon realize there’s still a lot to go in the film’s continuous two-and-a-half hour barrage of zombie cliches. The usual theatrics have to be deployed: betrayal, some pent-up personal issues, dumb decisions that lead to avoidable death. One of the few inspiring scenes involves a zombified tiger used by Siegfried & Roy in their act, the most frightening part of the film, and which leads to the most overtly violent and inventive moment Snyder concocts in his film.

After all the press Snyder got about the infighting that happened on “Justice League,” and the inevitable “triumphant” release of the “Snyder cut,” it turns out that Snyder is fast becoming the Michael Bay of his generation. The popcorn-inducing mayhem he creates here is predictable, the characters cardboard and cliched, but, most of all, there’s something cynically empty about the way he operates the whole thing. The result, much like Bay’s greatest hits, is a mechanical product devoid of soul.

SCORE: C-