Studio: Netflix
Director: Zack Snyder
Writer: Zack Snyder, Shay Hatten, Joby Harold
Producer: Deborah Snyder, Wesley Coller, Zack Snyder
Stars: Dave Bautista, Ella Purnell, Omari Hardwick, Ana de la Reguera, Theo Rossi, Matthias Schweighofer, Nora Arnezeder, Hiroyuki Sanada, Garret Dillahunt, Tig Notaro
Review Score:
Summary:
After a zombie outbreak turns Las Vegas into an undead wasteland, a former soldier assembles a motley crew of mercenaries to rob an abandoned casino vault.
Review:
“Army of the Dead’s” first 15 minutes set the stage for a bombastic B-movie blockbuster. Wisecracking military men muse over the mystery payload they’re transporting across the Nevada desert. Down the road, a distracted newlywed couple gets a literal head start on consummating their marriage, causing a collision with the convoy that unleashes a biomutant monster. That creature immediately embarks on a biting blitz whose chain reaction speedily overtakes Las Vegas with a massive zombie outbreak. Over opening credits, a slo-mo musical montage gorges on chaos, carnage, and comedy as topless showgirls, Elvis impersonators, and Liberace lookalikes turn undead while turning Sin City into a milieu of mayhem stocked to the top with bombs, bullets, and busloads of blood.
Yep, “Army of the Dead” feeds from the trough of fantastical escapist entertainment that’s commonly, and often affectionately, referred to unashamedly as “big, dumb fun.” Unfortunately, the film is disproportionately heavy on two of those terms while having nearly none of the third.
Sloppiness starts with the story. It’s a simple setup. A shady casino owner wants to recover 200 million dollars locked in a vault beneath his abandoned hotel on the Vegas strip. For some reason (a phrase that fits in front of any of the movie’s pedestrian plot points), he needs Dave Bautista to do it. Apparently oblivious to the “Rick and Morty” episode that savagely satirizes heist flick clichés, “Army of the Dead’s” next 45 minutes in its bloated two and a half hour runtime follow Bautista recruiting a crew that includes his estranged daughter, some woman, some guy, another woman, helicopter pilot Tig Notaro, a goofy German safecracker, and a sharpshooter who seems popular on social media or something. I’d refer to everyone by their character names except these lightweight roles don’t leave lasting impressions. Even end credits list one of them as “Lilly (The Coyote)” because the filmmakers knew no one would remember her without specifying what she did.
Pat characterizations aren’t the main problem. Flat flavor is. Bautista’s loose scheme proves out as perhaps the most boring movie heist imaginable. No one does any undercover work. There’s no need for secret surveillance. We don’t get any dirty double-crosses either. Okay, sure. Garret Dillahunt, a uniquely intriguing actor who routinely makes any TV show or movie instantly better simply by showing up, gets woefully wasted as an obvious mole advancing the casino owner’s hidden agenda. Outside of his easily predicted bit of backstabbing, the master plan is just an arbitrary group of mercenaries putting their heads down and barreling forward like a bull charging at a red cape. Battle through zombies, let the German oddball crack the safe, then fly out with Tig. That’s it? That’s it. And somehow it takes 148 minutes to accomplish.
Zack Snyder movies tend to be divisive for myriad reasons. But regardless of how arguably successful or unsuccessful Snyder is at telling stories and handling characters, one thing he can usually be relied on to always do well is deliver impressive technical polish. A perfect example is “Sucker Punch,” a hollow yet entrancing FX extravaganza I remember nothing about except it was a spectacular sizzle reel of explosive eye candy.
Shockingly, that’s not the case with “Army of the Dead” at all. Objectively speaking about visual value alone, “Army of the Dead” looks bafflingly terrible. Bizarrely shot with a limited focus lens, much of the footage is eye-wateringly blurry, dark, washed out, blown out, or obscured with lingering lens flares that would make J.J. Abrams say, “Geez, dial it down already.”
Some of the soft focus might be a side effect of FX necessities. Possibly as a means of compositing live action with CG imagery, there’s always at least one plane in the foreground, background, or both that’s fuzzier than a baby blanket. You might see staging where Tig Notaro walks side-by-side with Dave Bautista (Notaro was famously added to the film in post-production, never appearing alongside other actors in person), yet Bautista is a silhouette surrounded by a hazy halo, Notaro’s colors are muddy, and the blurred background is overexposed by sunlight.
It’s funny to realize Tig Notaro’s performance is the best thing about the movie, maybe the only good thing, and she wasn’t even in it to begin with. Folks can tout how “seamless” this green screen technology supposedly is, but that just isn’t true. Editing around nonexistent entities and computer-generated locations takes a toll on drama too. I don’t know for certain if this qualifies under ‘The Notaro Factor,’ i.e. shot at different times with different people in different places, but one scene of a tearful heart-to-heart between Bautista and his daughter never features a two-shot. The camera keeps cutting from close-up to close-up, failing to foster any intimacy by actually depicting the two of them sharing the same space.
Half-baked ideas burn “Army of the Dead” as much as anything. We’re warned early on that colossal piles of dusty corpses will come back to life when it rains, except no storm takes place. A running gag sees everyone added to the crew being promised a smaller and smaller share of the pie, but there isn’t a punchline where everyone finds out they were being increasingly shortchanged. The sharpshooter brings along an extra guy named Damon only for Damon to bone out entirely after deciding he doesn’t want to go on the mission. Snyder completely replaced an entire character yet he couldn’t cut out this inconsequential nobody? From UFOs most viewers don’t notice to a MacGuffin character whose final fate doesn’t receive a resolution, “Army of the Dead” loves throwing random things in the air without worrying if they have a safe spot to land.
“Army of the Dead” has a prequel in the works featuring the safecracker and also an anime series, which is to say nothing of a potential sequel teased by this film’s low octane conclusion. Maybe this is another case of multimedia world-building focusing on future layers of paint before erecting a stable foundation. “Army of the Dead’s” lackluster follow-through can’t count on generating interest in side stories when the main one isn’t all that engaging in the first place. Has Hollywood learned nothing from the ‘Dark Universe’ debacle?
Review Score: 45
Everyone else who has no problem with a fright flick that feels like “Lizzie McGuire” decided to get dark with a PG-13 Halloween special should do just fine.