Hot Picks
|
|
|
Army of the Dead
USA 2021
produced by Wesley Coller, Deborah Snyder, Zack Snyder, Bergen Swanson (executive) for The Stone Quarry/Netflix
directed by Zack Snyder
starring Dave Bautista, Ella Purnell, Omari Hardwick, Ana de la Reguera, Theo Rossi, Matthias Schweighöfer, Nora Arnezeder, Hiroyuki Sanada, Garret Dillahunt, Tig Notaro, Raúl Castillo, Huma Qureshi, Samantha Win, Richard Cetrone, Michael Cassidy, Steve Corona, Chelsea Edmundson, Zach Rose, Brian Avery, David K. Maiocco, Ryan Watson, Sabine Varnes, Mónica López, Kelly Phelan, James M. Halty, Leon Budrow, Maeve Garay, Danielle Burgio, Jessica Harbeck, Josh Horton, Natalie Jaramillo, Frank Andrade, Ava Wagenman, Wayne Dalglish, Casey Messer, Ken Thong, Donna Brazile, Sean Spicer, Sheila Awasthi, Sebastian Balchand, Colby Lemmo, Marisilda Garcia, Isachar Benitez, Carolyn Wickwire, Antonio Leyba, Colin Jones, Daisy Davis, Lora Martinez-Cunningham, Athena Perample, Albert Valladares, Alexander Ward, Steve Soliz, Jordyn Aurora Aquino, Sarah Minnich, Bernhard Eichholz, Ozzy Alvarez, Kevin Kirkpatrick, Eric Fiedler
story by Zack Snyder, screenplay by Zack Snyder, Shay Hatten, Joby Harold, music by Tom Holkenborg (= Zack Snyder), special makeup effects by Fractured FX, visual effects by Framestore, Mammal Studios, Crafty Apes, Instinctual VFX
review by Mike Haberfelner
|
When an army transport carrying a top secret load gets into an
accident that causes a much bigger explosion than it could have, said load
escapes - a kung fu zombie, who kills or turns all the soldiers
responsible for the transport, then heads for Las Vegas - which is soon
overrun by zombies but walled off from the rest of the world and deemed to
be nuked. Casino owner Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada) has no less than $200
million stored in a safe beneath his casino in Vegas, and of course wants
them back, so he hires hero-fallen-on-hard-times Scott (Dave Bautista) to
assemble a team of mercenaries who are to retrieve the money in exchange
for $50 million. This team includes Maria (Ana de la Reguera), who's
Scott's ex or something, Dieter (Matthias Schweighöfer), a safecracker -
because despite it being his safe, Tanaka doesn't give them the
combination to open it and only makes a fleeting remark that it's booby
trapped -, Scott's own daughter Kate (Ella Purnell) - who needs to get
into Vegas to rescue a friend, Geeta (Huma Qureshi) and who has of course
issues with her father -, wisecracking chopper pilot Marianne (Tig Notaro)
- who's to locate, fix and fly the escape chopper as one's not allowed to
fly in but apparently flying out is not an issue -, and Martin (Garret
Dillahunt) - Tanaka's man who apparently has his own agenda. At a refugee
camp just outside Vegas, Scott recruits Lilly (Nora Arnezeder), who has
been inside before several times and who is to be their guide, and she
insists on bringing along sleazeball camp officer Cummings (Theo Rossi) -
and once inside she shoots him in the leg to offer as sacrifice to the
ruling zombie class in town, the kung fu zombies ... alpha zombies, who
will give them safe passage in return. And soon enough, the zombie queen
(Athena Peramble) has cummings dragged away to be turned. Thus our heroes
make it to Tanaka's casino in relative safety, but there they find another
kind of zombies, the hibernating zombies, which can be woken up by too
much noise or light - so Martin wakes them up just to have a little
revenge on teammember Chambers (Samantha Win), who dies a heroine's death
in the process. Other than that, things go relatively hitchless, until
Martin out of the blue captures and beheads the zombie queen, claiming
this and not the retrieval of Tanaka's millions was the actual mission.
But when the zombie king (Richard Cetrone) learns about this, all hell
breaks loose and he, wearing a helmet, riding a zombie horse accompanied
by a zombie tiger, leads his minions to storm Tanaka's casino. So
ultimately, pretty much all of Scott's men and women are killed except for
himself, his daughter and pilot Marianne, but things go from bad to worse
when the nuking of Vegas is pushed forward a day with our heroes only
having minutes to spare, and Kate finally veers off to rescue her friend
... There are several scenes in Army of the Dead that
are actually quite entertaining, and of the actors at least Matthias
Schweighöfer as the naive and slightly effeminate German delivers a
memorable performance. The first problem of the film though is despite a
lengthy preposition all the characters remain paper-thin, so much so that
when the first of them, Athena Peramble as Chambers, is killed, one
doesn't really feel anything. And even Scott and Kate's father-daughter
conflict, that is of course resolved over the running time of the movie,
feels at best very clichéed and does little to drive the story. The next
problem is that the film feels like a well-assembled yet somewhat mindless
action movie, it's basically about tough guys and girls doing tough
things, using guns and brawns instead of brains, while the zombies feel
like the villain of the week, and are easily replaceable, especially,
since there's no homogenous consept for them, some are of the stumbling,
some of the hibernating, and some of the kung fu kind, and it seems
nothing but the situation determines what they are or aren't capable of.
As a result, there's no real zombie horror in this one at all. On a visual
level, director Snyder, who also served as his own director of photography
on this one, banks on extreme lack of depth throughout, which creates some
nice effects here and there - but is over-used to the point of nausea. In
all, not a disaster, but at roughly 150 minutes it clocks in about an hour
too long to be an entertaining zombie romp, especially since the film
doesn't bring anything new to the genre, and it really feels like fluff
throughout.
|
|
|