Movie review: Zack Snyder’s ‘Army of the Dead’ is loaded with great, gory fun

If you’re familiar with the 2009 film “Watchmen,” you already know that its director, Zack Snyder, gets a lot up on the screen before the opening credits. With his new one, “Army of the Dead,” Snyder’s approach to immediately grabbing an audience’s attention hasn’t changed.

A convoy of army vehicles is making its way along a Nevada highway. The contents (referred to as the payload) in one of the trucks is deemed secure. Things go wrong. “The payload is compromised!” shouts someone. (Zombie movie SPOILER: The payload is a zombie.) Things get vicious. Look, there in the distance, are the glittering lights of Las Vegas. And to the sounds of “Viva Las Vegas” (dueted by Richard Cheese and Allison Crowe), the city erupts into a frenzy of chaos and yellow-eyed zombie violence. Then the credits run.

“Army of the Dead” is a thrilling, horrifying, funny film that’s stocked with heroes and villains and monsters and other people and creatures that aren’t easy to categorize. For example, there’s Valentine, a large tiger that once belonged to Siegfried and Roy, who is now a gnarly zombie tiger, roaming the remains of Las Vegas.

The remains? Newscasts in the film explain: Sin City was overrun by zombies, it was walled in by the Army, and the POTUS and Congress have decided to nuke the place.

When we meet Scott Ward (Dave Bautista), he is immediately established as a gun-toting, zombie-killing hero. Sometime later, when wealthy Vegas hotelier and military man Bly Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada) meets Scott, who has been reduced to toiling as a short-order cook, Tanaka’s introductory line is a pip: “It’s not every man who saves the Secretary of Defense from a horde of flesh-eating monsters, and earns the Medal of Freedom, only to end up” … Scott finishes the thought … “working at a burger joint.”

Time for a new plot strand. Time for this zombie movie to become a heist movie, and then for the two genres to merge. Tanaka tells Scott of $200 million in a vault beneath the Vegas Strip. He wants him to put together a team to go in, evade the zombies, and retrieve the loot. In return, Scott will earn $50 million, to be split up among him and his team. And, oh, by the way … the government is dropping that bomb in 96 hours, so you’d better hurry.

Among the tough squad Scott assembles are Maria (Ana de la Reguera), an old flame, of sorts; Vanderobe (Omari Hardwick), an old pal; Marianne (Tig Notaro), a helicopter pilot; Dieter (Matthias Schweighofer), a safecracker who is, comically, timid, not tough; Lilly (Nora Arnezeder), who knows her way around the city; Scott’s daughter Kate (Ella Purnell), a feisty troublemaker; and others.

So, get inside the wall, follow the rules of zombie etiquette in order to forge a good-will relationship with them, figure out which zombies are slow (the Shamblers) and which are fast and strong (the rest of them), make it to the hotel, crack the safe, hightail it to the roof where an abandoned helicopter is waiting (ah, yes, a helicopter pilot), and vamoose before they drop the big one.

But zombies are coming from every direction, not everyone on the team can be classified as a clear-cut “good guy,” and a detail or two about the mission hasn’t been fully explained.

More Information

“Army of the Dead”

Written by Zack Snyder, Shay Hatten, and Joby Harold; directed by Zack Snyder

With Dave Bautista, Ella Purnell, Ana de la Reguera, Omari Hardwick, Tig Notaro, Matthias Schweighofer, Nora Arnezeder

Rated R

The early infusion of tension heads out on a steadily ramped-up trajectory, though breathers are provided with some comic dialogue and a few minutes of quiet for a couple of back stories. Lots of zombies have their heads blown off, the number of team members is reduced, there’s a limitless supply of ammunition, Kate – the troublemaker – causes some trouble, Dieter is the character with the best scream, the “King of Zombies” is an unhappy and vindictive zombie, the ticking clock of a nuclear bomb develops a timing glitch, and the mythologist Joseph Campbell gets a shout-out

This is two-and-a-half-hours of great, gory fun that absolutely flies by. Yes, that is Sean Spicer in a cameo scene as a TV news pundit. But the film loses no points for that. It was just something else that made me laugh.

“Army of the Dead” is available to stream now on Netflix.

Ed Symkus can be reached at [email protected].

Photo credit: Netflix