MOVIE REVIEW: Army of the Dead (2021)
Fresh from watching Netflix’s Army of the Dead and accompanying informational pieces on the side, I can say this movie was laughable and does not deserve to be seen. Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me explain what I mean.
Zack Snyder has really done a number on the viewing public. From 2011’s Sucker Punch (his “feminist think-piece”) to 2007’s 300 (a manly movie using history’s greatest pederasts — the Spartans — to justify modern war against the Middle East and Central Asia) and even his grimdark take on the DCEU, Mr. Snyder has twisted the very core of words and meaning to suit his ends. Even worse, he got Hollywood to back him up on his wild ideas. There was a point in his work history when this behavior was suitable: in his first movie, the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead.
The film was amazing and took us back to the mall where George Romero’s zombie sequel took place. It showed us new things (fast zombies) and ideas (zombie babies and the concept of in-utero infection) and injected some street smarts into the proceedings (making a war-wagon, prepping with store supplies, etc.) The movie was so well-received, CAPCOM made a video game about it called Dead Rising.
His first zombie movie was good — GREAT, even. Nearly 20 years after that first film, his second zombie film is BAD.
The movie starts off with a heist: a miscast Hiroyuki Sanada (Rush Hour 3, The Last Samurai, Legend of the Eight Samurai) calling himself “Mr. Tanaka” wants his $200 million dollars from his casino safe in Las Vegas. He would go in and get it himself, but the city has been overrun by zombies AND the safe is booby-trapped. On top of all that, the US government has cordoned off the city, marked it off American soil, and plans to nuke the city in 3 days to kill all the zombies. Dave Bautitsta (Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, Blade Runner 2049) is an ex-merc down on his luck whose previous claim to fame was…rescuing the Secretary of State from Las Vegas. The PTSD is so strong he flips burgers for a living rather than pick up the gun again. That all changes when Tanaka offers him $50 million dollars to split among his team if he can get into the walled-off zombie nest of a city and extract the $200 million. Of course Bautista says yes and assembles his crew.
Our 10-person crew consists of:
- Vanderohe (Omari Hardwick, “Power” [TV], “Dark Blue” [TV]), a psychologist who is ex-military and uses a gigantic circular power saw as a weapon
- Chambers (stuntwoman Samantha Win, Wonder Woman, Justice League, Man of Steel), a spicy Chola and social media influencer who works with…
- Guzman (Raúl Castillo Jr., Knives Out, Wrath of Man), a social media influencer and gang-banger who’s a deadshot
- Dieter (German actor Matthias Schweighöfer, Feardotcom, Valkyrie [2008]), an expert locksmith and stereotypical German weirdo
- Cruz (Mexican telenovela star Ana de la Reguera, “Narcos” [TV], “Jane the Virgin” [TV], The Book of Life), a lovely woman who works on cars and has a gift for long-arms suppressive fire.
- Lily the Coyote (French actress Nora Arnezeder, Maniac [2012], “Mozart in the Jungle” [TV]), a shady lady who knows her way in and out of barricaded Las Vegas
- Peters (comedian Tig Notaro, “Star Trek: Discovery” [TV], director of “2 Dope Queens” [TV]), a decently composited-in chopper pilot
- Martin (Garrett Dillahunt, “Fear the Walking Dead” [TV], “Deadwood” [TV], 12 Years a Slave), Tanaka’s head of security and obvious villain
- and Kate (British actress Ella Purnell, Never Let Me Go, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children), Dave Bautista’s daughter and team albatross.
There was another guy, but he was smart enough to not join up on the team. Another took his place: rapey refugee camp guard Cummings (Theo Rossi, Cloverfield, “Sons of Anarchy” [TV]). More on him later.
Once our team heads into fallen Las Vegas (soon to be called “Lost Vegas”), it becomes an anthropological adventure as we learn that the zombies inside are different from what we assume. They still eat human flesh and are undead, but only SOME are mindless. Other zombies in Lost Vegas have developed a hierarchy, even going so far as to have their own king called “Zeus” and an unnamed queen (played by Richard Cetrone and Athena Perample, respectively). There are zombie horses and a zombie tiger — Sigfried & Roy’s tiger, as a matter of fact. In any case, Cummings is given up as a sacrifice to the zombie royalty for safe passage.
The movie becomes complicated from there once they reach the hotel holding the vault: booby traps, infinite time-loops, zombie husbandry, unrequited love, betrayals, robo-zombies, alien hybrids (!!!), and so on. At the end of it all, the movie was an exercise in futility — both on my end and on the movie’s story. This was best exemplified in the form of Bautista’s daughter Kate.
I DO NOT KNOW WHY THIS CHARACTER EXISTS. She doesn’t help and passively gets every other team member killed. She makes demands to be put into a dangerous situation to save a random woman from the refugee camps that went into the Lost Vegas zone. Kate even goes so far as to guilt-trip her father into putting her into harm’s way. When it comes to survival in action and horror films, this person is WORSE than a child or baby. Somehow she fills this designation without ever making a sound.
This movie was hyped all to hell for a year before the COVID-19 pandemic, and now it has pandemic imagery running through it. Heap in an truckload of immigration imagery, images of a makeshift wall (which works a lot better than the one people competed to build), and some casual racism and it’s a Snyder joint for sure. It was badly written by Snyder himself, not helped by Bautista’s limited acting ability. With yet another Snyder joint in the bag, let’s hope he stays away from zombie movies in the near future — HOLD THE PHONE? Did I hear correctly that Army of the Dead is the beginning of a cinematic universe? Come on, just make a stand-alone film that ISN’T THREE GOD-AWFUL HOURS. Yes YOU heard right: Army of the Dead is 2 hours, 28 minutes of absolute crap with nuggets of gold and gems sticking out. It’s not worth it to go back and polish this turf, but polish Snyder will try to do in the (checks notes) Netflix anime series “Army of the Dead: Lost Vegas”.
PLEASE MAKE THE HURTING STOP.
CHOICE CUTS
- How much does paper money weigh? While one paper dollar weighs a little, a lot of paper money still weighs a lot more — no matter the denomination on the bill. In the vault, all the money was in $100 dollar bills. To make $200 million in $100 bills, that’s 2 million paper bills. According to the US Treasury, it takes 454 paper bills to make one pound. The team would have to move 2.2 tons of money out…and they brought BACKPACKS between them all to carry it.
- I enjoyed the costume design for the zombie royalty: the king wore a cape across his body, rode astride a zombie horse, and commanded the zombie tiger AND a legion of zombies. The zombie queen was a black-clad showgirl daubed with blood-darkened rubies and other precious stones fouled by decay and violence. Every move she made was a callback to her days as a dancer.
- The line for Hiroyuki Sanada to say was “easy-peasy Japan-eezy” and it became a point of debate: is it racist when a Japanese person says it? No, but it is racist when the non-Japanese writers write a line like that for a Japanese person to say. You can’t cover it up by changing “Japan-eezy” to “lemon-squeezy”.
- I HATE KATE SO MUCH
- I hate Dieter also, but not as much as I hate Kate.
- The idea of an expanded universe for this makes me sick to my stomach; set it all on fire.
- I love me some Chambers and Lily. They were insanely cool.
- In hindsight I wish they did not show the zombie tiger in the advertisements.
- The camp guard Cummings is an idiot: at no point did he ever think this strange woman floating around his camp would ever give him the time of day, let alone carnal attention? I’m glad Cummings died, turned into a zombie, and had his head turned to digital tomato chunks.
- Even though Martin died horribly and deservedly so, did we need to see it all? Every bloody second? For real? I think not.
- Zombie horses, zombie tigers…but no zombie birds or snakes? I suppose the reanimating force requires a minimum amount of mass, which birds and snakes may not have.
- In this universe, zombies can get pregnant. And interbreed with living humans, given some of the scenes.
- The reason why Tig Notaro doesn’t seem to be part of the scenes is because she was composited into the shots to replace comedian Chris D’Elia, who was released from the movie due to complaints about his off-screen behavior. Additional shots of only Ms. Notaro were also filmed and added in post-production.
- The uncommon zombies of Lost Vegas: in BTS content, Zack Snyder explains some blue-eyed zombies are robots covered in decaying flesh as observers by the US Government, and the others that have blue blood are alien-human hybrids.
- Potential time-loop: according to some Youtubers, the nuclear blast affected tachyons in the local area thus creating a repeating time loop. That’s why the team finds corpses dressed exactly like them all over the casino: They’ve done this before…in another timeline. Even stranger, the time-loop has happened several times because it’s under extraterrestrial control and the aliens want us to get the money.
This movie sucks SO hard.
