Army Of The Dead is a zombie/heist/drama about a group of former military who helped battle the zombie outbreak in Las Vegas which was subsequently quarantined. Some time later Scott(Dave Bautista) is approached to infiltrate the zone and recover $100s of millions before Vegas is hit with a tactical nuke. He reassembles his team and the adventure ensues.
Bautista has proved he can carry a movie first in Guardians then in Stuber and My Spy and he does his best here but is hamstrung by a bloated, poorly paced script, that lacks focus. The supporting cast is stunning- Omari Hardwick, Ana de la Reguera, Matthias Schweighöfer, among others- but across the board are given little to nothing to do and flounder in the quagmire of a story they find themselves in.
Writer/director Zac Snyder may have a specific visual style that he simply repeats but it is almost always a saturated smorgasbord when not overly shadowed and it's a pleasure here. But he seems, over the course of years and his questionable successes, become virtually incapable of editing particularly in regards to narrative. There is unquestionably a good movie in here somewhere and the instinct to return to his Dawn Of The Dead roots is a good one but the story simply has too many characters, time is misspent on unbelievable or irrelevant character development, never lands on a consistent theme or genre, and the action set pieces are mostly underwhelming. What's left is a sprawling mess.
Despite obvious talent involved a lack of focus renders all the spectacle banal.
Currently in theaters and on Netflix.
Don't See It.
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