What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. And that just so happens to include an army of zombies, along with millions of dollars of casino money just begging to be looted. Released on Netflix, Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead might not offer anything new to the undead genre, but it is undoubtedly fun and energetic, with plenty of zombie gore and heist action set in a post-apocalyptic undead Vegas.
Bly Tanaka: There’s two hundred million in the basement vault beneath the Strip. Two hundred million the insurance company already reimbursed me for, untaxable, untraceable.
Scott Ward: Unspendable.
Bly Tanaka: That’s where you come in.
After a zombie viral outbreak, Las Vegas has been walled off from the rest of the world, and with it millions of dollars buried beneath its many casinos. Living outside its fortress like walls, casino boss Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada) contacts Scott Ward (Dave Bautista), a veteran when it comes to zombie slaying, with a “simple” job: form a team to break into the Vegas Strip and steal $200 million from a high-security vault before the US government nukes the city. Easy money… but high stakes. This is Vegas, after all.
Snyder’s Army of the Dead in this sense is as much a Las Vegas heist movie as it is a fun, action-oriented zombie flick – or Ocean’s Eleven meets Dawn of the Dead. At times it feels very video game-y with its over-the-top, sometimes comical, zombie slaughtering carnage and succeeds because it doesn’t take itself too seriously. That being said, it is occasionally marred by dialogue intended to flesh out its main characters, as opposed to the rotting zombie hordes awaiting them outside the casinos. Thankfully these moments are few and far between.
Snyder’s zombie flick does more than mundanely shamble along like the familiar if lacklustre undead hordes that often overrun our cinemas. While it often feels like a tribute to the classics, it is immediately clear Snyder is simply having fun with the genre rather than trying to put his own unique spin on it, which works to his advantage. And touchingly so, given that his 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake effectively kickstarted his career in the first place. What’s more, Las Vegas isn’t just occupied by the same decaying, unthinking armies of infected dead; Snyder introduces his own breed of “smart” zombies, complete with a unique king/ queen hierarchy dynamic, which feels like a logical evolution to Romero’s classic zombie. At least as far as an “evolved zombie” can be considered logical. In this sense, Army of the Dead is reminiscent of, if not a faint successor to, Day of the Dead and Land of the Dead. Not to mention its zombified tiger and cape-wearing zombie king riding a zombie horse in super-heroic, Medieval fashion. An ironic nod to Batman and Superman, perhaps, that doesn’t go unnoticed. Wouldn’t be Vegas without a little showmanship, even from that comes from its resident zombies.
Dieter: What if I took a big rock and smashed it into the head? Would that work?
Scott Ward: Yeah. Yeah, that also would still be targeting the brain, so that would work
With lavish displays of gore and rotting zombie flesh, Zack Snyder’s take on the of the Dead is ultimately a fun flick, with a refreshingly diverse cast. However despite this the characters are somewhat limited in complexity, becoming one the film’s weaker points. Though it could also be argued that character development and writing are hardly the strong suit of zombie apocalypse films of its ilk.
Dave Bautista’s Scott Ward is an expert in the art of dismembering the titular armies of the dead, and plays a badass muscle-bound hero with a tragic backstory that creates a rift in his relationship with his daughter – Ella Purnell. While Bautista’s character is a relatively vanilla hero, the rest of his team fulfil the ex-marine trope characters you might expect if the Colonial Marines from Aliens survived and were brought back for a Xenomorph heist movie. That is to say, well acted as they may be, they don’t do much to deviate from what you might expect from similar movies. Maria Cruz (Ana de le Reguera) is possibly the most forgettable member with very little to distinguish herself during the feature, though admittedly Matthias Schweighöfer’s Dieter does offer some comic relief as a socially awkward, if passionate vault-breaker, along with Tig Notaro as the snarky helicopter pilot and get-away flyer, Marianna Peters. Or as she reminds us, the two most important members of the team. Theo Rossi meanwhile is convincingly sleazy as Burt Cummings, who meets an oh-so-satisfying comeuppance, but only serves to remind anyone familiar with these character archetypes that their fates are easy to predict.
Credit should, however, be given to Richard Cetrone and Athena Perample as the king and queen zombie, whose Vegas showbiz costumes echo Zack Snyder’s foray into superhero cinema, resembling a cape and cowl Batman-Superman hybrid and Wonder Woman-esque tiara zombie. The dynamic between the two and animalistic intelligence they display serves to heighten the threat level in Snyder’s movie, and the way they move shows that even post-apocalypse Vegas is a deadly all or nothing arena to gamble in.
It’s a goddamn zombie tiger. That’s crossing the line
Used as a metaphor in the past for excessive consumerism, or simply for the sake of throwing hungry rotting corpses at unfortunate protagonists, zombies have spread through the gore strewn low-budget horror underworld as quickly as the apocalyptic plagues that create them, often resulting in features that are as lifeless and uninteresting as the decaying corpses themselves. Zack Snyder is no stranger to zombies, either, having started his career with 2004s Dawn of the Dead and later dabbling with Nazi zombies in Overlord. Going into Army of the Dead, you shouldn’t expect elaborate character moments or a deeply profound narrative that reinvents the zombie genre, rather a fun zombie movie with choice camera work, an undead tiger, and a unique apocalyptic Vegas setting.
