Sunday, 6 June 2021

VOD: Army Of The Dead (dir: Zack Snyder, 2021)

"This should be a simple in-and-out..."
 

Snyder may have reinvigorated the cinematic zombie genre with his excellent Dawn Of The Dead reimagining, but with this adequate heist/zombies mash-up that veers very close to the storyline of the recent Train To Busan: Peninsula, here it merely demonstrates just how entrenched the tropes have now become.  Occasional set-pieces are executed well, but the film as a whole never quite matches the sharply-edited and ferocious opening montage that shows the fall of Las Vegas that gives rise to the main casino-heist storyline.  Attempts to inject some USPs - a zombie tiger, semi-sentient Alpha zombies - feel inconsequential, and apart from a couple of solid performances (Matthias Schweighofer as the 'comedy' ace safecracker, and Tig Notaro basically replaying her snarky engineer character from Star Trek: Discovery) the cast does not register much beyond being potential zombie-snack-fodder.  Gore fans are rewarded with some suitably squelchy moments, but the decision to give the film a running time of almost two-and-a-half hours is both testing for the viewer and baffling.

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