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With their massive scale, their pricey effects, and their often supersized runtimes, Zack Snyder’s explosive action movies have become a Summer Blockbuster Season staple. And as the world gradually attempts to figure out how to do movies in a post-COVID world, Snyder’s Army of the Dead takes a cue from other studio tentpoles, making its way both to theaters and to Netflix for viewing wherever you’re comfortable.
Army of the Dead goes on a deadly but lucrative mission with a group of fearless mercenaries. Following a zombie outbreak, all of Las Vegas has been walled off to contain the horrors inside. But with just days left until the President plans to bomb the entire city and its undead inhabitants, a wealthy casino owner contacts Scott Ward (Dave Bautista) and offers him $50 million to retrieve a fortune from a casino vault. The money is too good to pass up, so he assembles a team to take on the city’s deadliest zombies.
With its zombiefied post-apocalyptic Sin City action, Army of the Dead is definitely an explosive adventure. The team ventures into the destroyed city during the day, careful not to call attention to themselves or come into contact with any of the undead residents. But, of course, it’s never that easy—and they find themselves in danger around every turn. That definitely makes for a big, noisy, head-exploding free-for-all as the team races to get to their goal before it’s too late.
The film’s greatest problem is nothing new for Snyder. It seems as though he simply doesn’t know when enough is enough—and in trying to stuff his films with all the action and effects and awesomeness that he possibly can, he ends up with a film that’s big and overstuffed but painfully short on development.
The film spends very little time focusing on the characters or their stories. What development there is comes in short snippets—and there’s so little of it that viewers will often find themselves wondering about the identities of many of them. If you can’t even identify the characters, you can’t really feel invested in their story—so the deaths just don’t really matter. And unless you’re just in it for the zombie head-shots, it makes for a somewhat tiresome experience.
Army of the Dead definitely has plenty of Snyder’s signature extreme action. But if it had focused a little less on the action and a little more on the characters and their story, it might have been a more captivating film. Instead, it’s mostly just long and repetitive.
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