Zac Snyder’s spiritual sequel to Dawn of the Dead is Army of the Dead. After a military convoy unleashes a zombie, the undead specimen makes its way to viva Las Vegas! In no time at all, the city of sin and all its dwellers have turned into flesh-eating monsters, and the ‘States have no other option than to wall off the city, and nuke it out of existence. But just before the scheduled date, weapons and zombie-battling veteran Scott Ward (Dave Bautista), and a hand-picked team of skilled mercenaries, are hired by businessman Bly Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada) to retrieve millions of dollars from a secured vault buried under one of the richest casinos. It’s a race against the clock, and a battle against your smarter-than-average hoards – beware, belly-dancers and Siegfried & Roy’s tigers.
I watched Dawn of the Dead again earlier in the week in preparation, and it occurs to me that anything zombie-relate after The Walking Dead is pushing up hill – they had to come up with ways to keep the show fresh for a long time and succeeded for as long as they did, with well-dwelling zombies, and chrome-headed zombies, and etcetera. I know Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead predates The Walking Dead, but that show utilises its time, telling a similar story of survival most effectively. That’s why I like this idea – a heist movie; a single event inside a zombie-filled environment. And this movie actually contains some pretty cool ideas for zombie-related drama, with a large majority of them coming thick and fast in a spectacular opening credit. I know Snyder gets criticised for being GOOD at putting film to a soundtrack, but who cares! He is elite, and ‘let the man paint.’ Zac’s even channelling the emotion behind Carl and his wife from Up, getting us up to speed with some of our characters, and how the zombie invasion went down.
From here on, I’ll be talking freely about outcomes within the movie, so this is a spoiler warning. Then again, I usually do talk about outcomes, so just a reminder that, ‘always spoilers’ – (don’t let this boob tell you what to think of a movie; watch it for yourself and then come here to compare notes).
The best praise I can dump on this movie is that, this is how you introduce a crew! So many movies of the current day are all about bringing teams together, and Army of the Dead has one of the best team assembles I’ve seen. Keep it simple, and Army of the Dead ensures its characters are interesting too. There are portions where certain characters don’t have a line or screen time in minutes, but they aren’t forgettable, and I was always eager to find out more about each of them. As the mission started, I actually didn’t want to see any of them get ripped to shreds, and yet, due to the genre and the risks involved in the mission, it was highly inevitable for these little darlings. Maybe it was just my mood, as I was still cut up about the recently married Vegas couple succumbing to a head-on with the army too – you could just tell they were made for each other and off to have a better life together 😏. I say I didn’t want to see anyone die, but that is except for quarantine camp jock Burt (Theo Rossi) who was clearly being seduced to be zombie fodder. Sorry sleazeball, but you had to go, but it’s good to see Theo Rossi getting a notable gig after his turn on Luke Cage.
The movie holds a deeply excitable and frenetic tension for a long period of time. It sets up Las Vegas with all the indulgence and allure usually associated with the place, and I bet anyone familiar with the city got a further kick out of recognising certain locations and layouts. As I’ve said already, due to The Walking Dead I’ve seen a lot of scenarios before, but I was still white-knuckling it when the social media vixen, Chambers (Samantha Win), was led the wrong way with green glowsticks – that was a fantastic sequence. As was seeing hotel manager Martin (Garrett Dillahunt) get mauled by the tiger, reminiscent of Leo Di Caprio rolling around with that bear in The Revenant – plus, ain’t it satisfying when a movie treats its villain with as must distain as possible; a fierce death.
I’d be lying if I said I was as enthusiastic about the finale as I was for first two acts. Army of the Dead doesn’t end by doing anything too unexpected, as if the freshness of a perfectly planned beginning peters out to a generic race to evacuate, trigged up by pilot Marianne (Tig Notaro) randomly pump-faking desertion, and Scott going back to food truck conversations whilst laying in his own blood. And what is with Zac’s obsession with zombie babies? Weird. Then there’s one glaring factor that seriously bugged me having the ending the way it is, and that is that Kate (Elle Purnell) was told to stay and make sure the kids got out by Friday. She was told by the very woman she went in to rescue. The Indian doctor Geeta (Huma Qureshi) wanted to make sure her kids were okay because she knew she might die, so Kate, who thought Geeta was dumb for going into the danger zone in the first place, had no business going in after her. At the time, when she wrangled her way onto the team, it didn’t bother me as much; it’s only emphasised because she’s the last-one-standing. And look, in these movies, everyone makes a call, right or wrong, and you have to accept it; were the entire team stupid to go in on a last-minute scavenger hunt for money? Probably. But Kate directly gets her father and the other characters killed, and so I can’t qualify her as a brave scream queen in my book when she is so reckless; and I’m not sure the movie fully sides with me on that. I’m ultimately not as joyous that she got out alive as I think I should be, because she put too many characters that I liked in jeopardy. I don’t know, maybe this is something that won’t bother me on subsequent viewings, because it’ll be what it is.
Army of the Dead though, for the large part, is fucking awesome. I had a fun time with it. This is another nod for Snyder; the second of the two exciting popcorn movies from the same director in the same calendar year; how often does that happen.
4.0
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