TV Obsessive
Army of the Dead
Hawk: Zack Snyder has a level of passion, confidence, and love for his material that regardless of what he makes, it’s interesting on some level. The dude just goes for it, for better or for worse. I think Sucker Punch is awful, but only Snyder would make an $80 million live action anime/pseudo musical about trauma, and the fact that he (sort of) saw that through to fruition is respectable. I’ve overall grown to appreciate his vision for the DC universe, despite his clumsy Superman/Jesus metaphor having all of the subtlety of Dr. Manhattan’s disregard for clothing, but Army of the Dead is a fine palate cleanser.
The main plot is honestly pretty interesting: a zombie apocalypse has been contained to Las Vegas, and a team of mercenaries led by Dave Bautista is sent back in to recover a vault of money before a nuclear bomb is dropped on the horde. That’s the basic logline, but there’s also a father-daughter reconciliation story, a zombie hierarchy with a queen, a zombie tiger, zombies that hibernate in place, Indiana Jones-style traps leading to the score, and so on.
Like most of Snyder’s work, it is bloated, unwieldy, and way too leaden with franchise-starting ideas. The script is a mess, leaving too many Chekhov’s guns unfired. The characters aren’t particularly interesting save for a couple of relationships and a number of stupid decisions, and my shoot-from-the-hip prediction for how things would end was a perfect headshot. But damn it if there isn’t something bizarrely attractive about this movie. It’s not even so-bad-it’s-good. It’s kind of not great, but also really fun in other ways, and you just want to see where else it’s going to go.
It’s audacious enough that when one character starts randomly and sarcastically throwing out a multiverse/time loop theory monologue, you really wouldn’t be surprised if Snyder, the crazy bastard, actually had that in the cards. I’m reminded of some of the Knightmare sequences from BVS and Snyder’s Justice League epilogue: he’s planting seeds left and right—there’s even a very quick shot that looks like a zombie is also a robot? With glowing blue eyes!?–and whether this road is good or bad, it sure is intriguing. Admittedly, Snyder is very much in need of some quality control on his independently written scripts—someone to tell him “no” every once in a while—but at the same time there’s still something good to be said about the excesses of Army of the Dead.
And Tig Notaro, man! One of the best comedians working today gets to basically play herself as the cigar-chomping, aviator-wearing, witheringly deadpan pilot who accepts the heist job sight unseen and rejects any details thereof because she hates her current one that much. Notaro consistently and reliably has the best one-liners in the movie, and the fact that she was a late addition to the movie—filming her scenes in front of green screen and digitally added into the movie, seamlessly replacing Chris D’elia—is even more impressive.
The icing on the cake is the terrific opening credits sequence, featuring the grisly, grimly hilarious fall of Las Vegas in slow motion, set to a cover of “Viva Las Vegas” by lounge singer/parodist Richard Cheese and Allison Crowe. The most Zack Snyder thing about it is it’s a movie packed with the most Zack Snyder things, and love it or hate it, it’s one of the wildest movies I’ve seen in 2021.
Those are our recommendations this week! What are yours? Let us know in the comments!
