Army of the Dead (2021) – Movie Review
After a zombie outbreak occurs in Las Vegas, the city is walled off. A group of mercenaries is hired to infiltrate the quarantine zone and rob an abandoned casino.
Army of the Dead was decently entertaining and pretty much a straight-forward zombie movie. Following Snyder’s Justice League, I was pretty excited for this. The idea of blending together a zombie movie with a heist movie: What’s not to love? Unfortunately, Army fell a bit below my expectations and while there were some great parts, I thought it was overall just OK.
Something I quite enjoyed about the movie was the differing levels of zombies. There was the Alpha who was fast and intelligent in addition to the stereotypical slow and dumb zombies. This kind of reminded me of I am Legend, where the audience got to see a more in-depth side of zombies and their motivations. Plus, we got to see a zombie tiger which was just frakkin’ cool.
I thought this movie had fantastic music choices, as per usual with Snyder. I mean, what other song could you possibly use to highlight a montage of zombies ravaging Las Vegas besides the upbeat “Viva Las Vegas”? He even had “Zombies” by the Cranberries in the film, and it fit like a matching puzzle piece to compliment the movie’s theme.
The cast was decent here, with Bautista pulling his weight as the lead role. Now I’m even more interested in seeing him in the Knives Out sequel. I also really liked Omari Hardwick as Vanderohe and Matthias Schweighöfer as Dieter and the bromance that developed between them. It was also quite impressive seeing them digitally add in Tig Notaro. I feel like it looked a little wonky because I was looking for it, but it definitely was done well enough to tell the story.
From the ending of the movie, it looked like Snyder could be setting up a sequel. It has already been announced that a prequel, Army of Thieves, is expected to release later this year about the safecracker Dieter, directed by and starring Schweighöfer. In addition, an animated series is being created by Jay Oliva called Army of the Dead: Lost Vegas.
Overall, I’d rate it 3 ½ /5 stars. This really felt like just another zombie movie with nothing revolutionary to set it apart from the rest. I never became very attached to any of the characters and the story was mediocre. Now, that being said, this was still a zombie movie and if that’s your thing, you’ll definitely be entertained.