Main cast: Dave Bautista (Scott Ward), Ella Purnell (Kate Ward), Omari Hardwick (Vanderohe), Ana de la Reguera (Maria Cruz), Theo Rossi (Burt Cummings), Matthias Schweighöfer (Ludwig Dieter), Nora Arnezeder (Lily), Tig Notaro (Marianne Peters), Raúl Castillo (Mikey Guzman), Huma Qureshi (Geeta), Garret Dillahunt (Martin), Samantha Win (Chambers), and Hiroyuki Sanada (Bly Tanaka)
Director: Zack Snyder
Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead has no resemblance to the Army of the Dead that came out in 2008, although both movies featured zombies on the loose. Then again, one can argue that his Dawn of the Dead had little to do with the famous other movie it was allegedly based on, and I bring that movie up because there is a horrible, potential deal-breaker here that is similar that in the other movie: a horrid, unlikable character—female, naturally… sigh—that goes all Leeroy Jenkins, causing everyone else to break formation to save her sorry ass, and hence, a bulk of the body count is entirely due to her. This is a deal breaker because that horrid twunt goes off into sunset while the world burns around her.
That character is Kate Ward, the daughter of Scott Ward, the leader of the heist team hired by Bly Tanaka to break into the zombie-infested, walled-off Las Vegas and retrieve his $200 million from the bank vault in his casino, before the US military nuke Las Vegas sky-high to rid the country of the zombie infestation. They don’t have much time, and all goes swimmingly until some of the team members reveal that they have agendas of their own. Oh, and there are intelligent zombies here, that have sex and can produce zombie babies.
The climax of the movie is, of course, Kate running off despite being told not to, to save a friend that is likely dead already, and in the end, most everyone dies while running after her, and oh, her entire “rescue mission” ends up being pointless anyway so good job breaking it, twunt. Plus, she guilt-trips her father into bringing her along in the first place, telling him that he should bring her along and keep her safe, or she will just sneak after them and die in the process, and of course he doesn’t want that, right. This entitled, rude, overly-emotional twunt is everywhere in this movie, and poor Ella Purnell, she is playing a character that is written to be pure horrid in a pint-size bag of carbon material.
The rest of the cast is pretty much one-dimensional dead meat walking for the most part, and they are solely defined by some superficial personality quirk or, in the case of Omari Hardwick’s Vanderohe, looking damn fine walking shirtless like that, mm hmm baby. Dave Bautista spends most of the non-action moments looking morose or ugly-crying in a way that has me thinking that I have way too much of his O-face up close and no, I don’t want to have sex with him at all because of this.
This movie is directed by Zack Snyder, so of course it is gorgeously made. Some scenes are works of art, detailed and intricately so, but that’s pretty much most of his movies anyway. They are great from a technical point of view, but hopelessly bad to mediocre when it comes to story and characters. This one is no different. The story is packed with tired old clichés. In fact, the movie opens with an eventual montage of people killing and being eaten by zombies slow-mo while happy music plays on—seriously, these movie people need a new gimmick because the whole slow-mo violent scenes accompanied by cheery music is something I have come across so often that I’d be happy not to encounter a similar scene in a while. The rest of the movie is composed of mostly predictable heist movie tropes and what not. The CGI kill scenes aren’t too bad, but at the same time, they don’t wow me enough to make up for the whole predictable, done-many-times, oh-god-Mr-Bautista’s-O-face-again, why-the-hell-did-no-one-kill-Kate-yet-ugh feel of the movie.
In other words, this is a well-made kind of meh. Just like most of Mr Snyder’s works, in other words—pretty, okay in a brainless fluff way, but ultimately, meh.
