While Zack Snyder’s Justice League director’s cut has taken up plenty of headlines, he also had another film being released this year – Army of the Dead.
Anyone who has followed Synder’s career will have seen his serviceable remake of Dawn of the Dead in 2004, but here he is given a blank canvas to create his own zombie chaos.
The refreshing part about Army of the Dead is that it attempts to evolve the long-established zombie mythology with different ‘breeds’ of the undead with some time spent bringing them into 2021.
While maybe classed a ‘zombie movie’ Army… is more of a heist film with a band of mercenaries given the ultimate task to infiltrate a zombie-infested Las Vegas to retrieve a lot of money.
On the surface this sounds like a decent concept but it becomes bogged down very quickly in plodding exposition and it feels like an hour goes by of the 148 minute run time before it really gets going.
The flipside of this is that we are given plenty of time with our characters including standouts Dave Bautista and Tig Notaro’s Marianne Peters who simply oozes coolness.
Snyder is at his best when the action is frenetic and it does feel like there is a great 90 minute action horror in here somewhere it just needs a lot of fat trimming from it.
Ultimately Army of the Dead is just too bloated to be compelling and feels like a struggle to reach that finish line.
Army of the Dead is streaming now on Netflix.
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