There’s a lot going on for Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead in its early scenes, as the film’s ability to set up a promising adventure is its strongest suit. The worldbuilding is superb as the film begins, with a Snyder-style slow-motion opening credits sequence set to a sluggish cover of “Viva Las Vegas” that establishes the onset of a zombie outbreak in Las Vegas. It sets the foundation for our team of quarantined mercenaries who attempt to pull off a heist in the midst of an impending nuclear bomb that will destroy the city on July 4th because the president thinks it will “be really cool.” But like its Vegas setting, the first chunk of this film is akin to seeing the same symbol pop up two times in a row on a slot machine. Your heart beats faster, thinking you’re about to hit the jackpot and then… womp, you bust.
That’s not to say the film is a failure, but it certainly fails to live up to the potential launched by those opening sequences. The thrill of the heist film is watching the plan come to fruition, but the more and more Army of the Dead ventures into its Vegas setting and travels deeper into its targeted underground vault, the more rambling and pedestrian it becomes. We hit familiar plot beats and the endless gunfire begins to blur into mindless cacophony. The large ensemble cast is complete with characters who are all given a handful of unique (albeit familiar) traits, and everybody gets their respective time to shine, but they never quite come together as a group in the ways better films of this mold have accomplished.
It’s a shame, because one of Snyder’s best films is his 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead, which was also his debut feature. So to see the filmmaker revisiting the zombie genre with the added twist of a heist film has all the ingredients for success. They just never quite seem to be mixed correctly. Serving as his own director of photography, the look and feel of Army of the Dead is all muddy lighting and shallow focus, and while it accomplishes some cool feats visually, it’s often left for dead when it comes to appealing aesthetics. Most of the viewing experience was spent completely unenthralled with the images of screen, even if the story being told was never that boring, despite its flaws.
It’s a lot of ambition that is never quite reached, leaving us with a disorganized concoction that waxes and wanes in terms of success. The zombie makeup and special effects are one of the movie’s sharpest assets, and there’s plenty of entertaining banter and character interplay to keep things interesting, but at nearly two and a half hours, Army of the Dead never justifies its gratuitous length. There’s a tight 100-minute movie in here somewhere that’s never found, and the movie is at its worst when it’s losing itself in subplots and meandering around Vegas as if it’s improvising off a blank script page.
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