EAT • SLEEP • REVIEW • REPEAT
ARMY OF THE DEAD
Bloody long & bloody good.
Zombies! It was zombies all along. After all these years of Marthas, director’s cuts, and desaturated superhero shenanigans, it’s clear the undead were always the true key to Zack Snyder’s heart.
Seventeen years on from Zack Snyder’s directorial debut, and with so much bad blood and toxic discourse clogging up the air around him, it’s easy to forget that, before all the washed-out colours and overstuffed comic book adaptations, there sits a cracking little remake of a zombie classic. Against all the odds and against the backdrop of a sub-genre at a dead end, 2004’s Dawn of the Dead was an inventive and worthy reimagining of the George A. Romero original.
Oddly, despite the critical and financial success of the film, Zack Snyder has not set foot anywhere near a zombie since, yet, despite the seventeen-year sabbatical, the dude’s affinity with the undead is clear for all to see. And with the Netflix release of Army of the Dead finally here, it’s an affinity that has endured through all the trouble and strife of the director’s DC years, one that you hope, for everyone’s sake, Snyder builds on into the future.
After a zombie outbreak leaves Las Vegas in ruins and cut off from the rest of the world, Scott Ward (Dave Bautista), a displaced local and former war hero, is tasked to assemble a team of mercenaries for the score of a lifetime. Approached by casino boss Bly Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada), Scott and his team must break into the zombie-infested city to retrieve $200 million sitting in a vault beneath the strip before the entire city and all its undead inhabitants are levelled by a nuke.
Free of the hype and suffocating pressure of Warner Bros and the DCEU, it’s no surprise that Army of the Dead feels like a Zack Snyder reborn, as the autonomy and breathing space that comes with a Netflix deal means the director has properly cut loose for the first time in quite some time. It’s a freedom that Netflix have afforded many fellow big-name directors in the past and it’s one that, almost inevitably, has led to a final product encapsulating both the best and worst of Snyder as a filmmaker.
At its best, there’s an energy and a vigour to Army of the Dead that we haven’t seen from Snyder since his debut, and with a tone and a colour palette strikingly different to the po-faced grimdark that marked his DC years, it’s clear the director is utterly unleashed and revelling in it. Embracing the absolute lunacy of the film’s Vegas-heist-with-zombies setup, Snyder gets the best out of Army of the Dead when letting rip with the inherent excesses of the premise.
Allowing Snyder to dial the carnage up to 11 without it feeling out of place, the decision to set Army of the Dead in Las Vegas is something of a master stroke, with the intrinsic idiosyncrasies of the infamous city lending themselves perfectly to the colourful absurdity of the plot. Despite Snyder’s decision to take on DP duties himself and the rather odd call to shoot the film using an old shallow focus lens that makes it feel like a feature-length Instagram post, there’s a distinct shift in colour palette and visual tone from anything the director has done for the past few years.
Alas, however, despite this uptick in mood and energy, the free rein Zack Snyder’s been given brings with it many of the director’s worst traits. Indulged in a way that only Netflix can (see also Scorsese and Fincher), Snyder has clearly been given a huge sack of cash to let loose in whatever way he wishes, resulting in an end product that, for better or worse, has his fingerprints all over it.
Foremost in all this is just how unnecessarily long the entire thing is. Clocking in at a bloated 148 minutes, Army of the Dead may be mercilessly shorter than Snyder’s cut of Justice League (a film with a running time that makes Lawrence of Arabia feel brisk), yet it can’t help but frequently weigh the entire movie down.
At its heart, the film’s plot is pretty simple, and as it sticks fairly closely to the format you’d expect from an Aliens-inflicted zombie heist movie, there really is no need for Army of the Dead to be as long as it is. Hidden beneath all the unnecessarily extended chit chat, exposition, and drawn out set up, there’s a perfectly good sub-2-hour movie in there somewhere.
After a barnstorming opening that hilariously and bloodily details the hyper-localised zombie apocalypse taking hold in Sin City, the film then grinds to a halt and takes far too long getting going again. Bogged down by an overt desire to crowbar in pointless side stories and an emotional angle that never really sits well with the zombie action, the film frequently comes off as bloated and ponderous.
With characters bogged down in cliché, you’d be forgiven for expecting Army of the Dead’s cast to wilt under the pressure, yet they’re clearly thriving, as despite the paper-thin characterisation and lumbering plot, the ensemble have an absolute ball with it all. In many ways, their clichés are all part of the fun, as the cast, especially the core team, roll with the punches (and bullets) to offer performances with more than enough collective energy to lift the entire film.
As the undoubted standouts, both Tig Notaro and Matthias Schweighöfer are an absolute delight throughout, as their pitch-perfect line delivery and comic chops suit the film seamlessly. Alongside them, Omari Hardwick is excellent and the perfect blend of action hardman and irresistible charm, while Dave Bautista adds to his burgeoning acting reputation playing the softly-spoken and decidedly stoic lead.
All in, despite the recurrent issues that have followed Zack Snyder throughout his career, it’s just good to see him out here having fun at last. Yes, it’s overlong and plagued with plot holes, pacing issues, and pointless needle drops (there’s honestly no need to ever play Zombie by The Cranberries in an actual zombie movie), yet, free of the burdens of DC and the Justice League, Snyder has gone back to his zombie roots and having an absolute blast with it.
Bloated, brainless, and wholly unoriginal though it may be, when Army of the Dead gets going, it really gets going, and about as fun as anything its director has put out in the last decade. For better or worse, Army of the Dead sees Zack Snyder at his most excessive, laying on all his usual filmmaking quirks as thick as zombie blood, but after years of trying to exert his brash style on the comic book movie, he may have finally found the perfect genre fit for it all – and it was right there in front of him all along.
