Review: ‘Army of the Dead,’ A Perfectly Serviceable Zombie Heist Action Flick
“Gotta be lobster rolls…”
As Ocean’s Eleven tells us, there are millions of dollars beneath the Vegas strip at any one time. If a zombie apocalypse were ever to occur, the cash in all those vaults would probably be one of the last things on most people’s minds. For Scott Ward (Dave Bautista), that leaves an unattended fortune primed for the taking … that is if he can get past the undead army surrounding it.
To retrieve it, he assembles a ragtag crew of mechanics, meatheads, and mercenaries at the behest of Bly Tanaka, a puppet master billionaire who promises a $50 million payout if the team can extract $200 million from an underground casino vault in the center of a quarantined Las Vegas. The United States has somehow managed to seal off the entire city from the rest of the country, so while the rest of the world carries on as usual, the city of vice is left for dead.
The only problem are, well, the zombies, and for our gun-touting thieves for hire they come in two varieties: shamblers and alphas. The former are your standard procedure braindead undead, but the latter are a super-intelligent type of unionized zombies reminiscent of those in I Am Legend. They have heightened strength, extra agility, and can communicate with one another, all the things that make a quick in-and-out job much more difficult. Oh, and there’s a nuke that’s about to destroy the city, so the team best not doddle.
Zach Snyder’s Army of the Dead is the director’s grand return to the zombie genre, and this time he does so with considerably more experience than he had in 2004. With developed cinematic sensibilities and a larger budget, he tackles a genre mashed zombie-heist-action flick with the gusto one might expect from a Snyder film, which means it comes with all his directorial traits audiences either love or hate.
Heralding from heist movies and the zombie flicks, Snyder combines tropes from both genres to create a familiar narrative held upright by the director’s penchant for spectacle and action. His overdrawn narratives — seemingly needing an entire runway to plot his films — are excessive, and at two hours and twenty-eight minutes, Army of the Dead is no different than his previous works. Getting off the ground takes time, despite abbreviated introductions to our characters, but once bullets start splitting zombie skulls, there’s enough moment to moment action to prevent you from looking down at your watch. Does it need to be this long? No, but rarely does Netflix reign in their auteurs.
While we’re on the point of creative control, it’s also worth noting that Snyder filled DP duties for the film, which is significant because the film is shot with a razor thin depth of field that softens every image. Snyder shoots Army of the Dead with an incredibly fast T-stop to the point where racking focus is often latent. There were times where I thought my vision was getting worse or my glasses were fogged by my mask, but truthfully, it was just an actor shifting out of focus or the shot was so shallow that everything except the a face was in focus. It’s a creative choice that I don’t think cultivates the sort of intimacy associated with shallow depth of field and it certainly doesn’t work in the darker environments or when the motion starts picking up.
That being said, Snyder’s strengths lie in the film’s action which makes up the lion share of the film. It’s hard to be too upset by a lacking character arc focused on Ward and his daughter or the deployment of conventional plot points when the film we’re getting is a pure popcorn blockbuster play. It is, for all intents and purposes, entertaining, and from that perspective, Army of the Dead is perfectly serviceable.
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