I have already gone over how much I don’t like Zack Snyder. More than once. Well, actually 300 was pretty good as a straight translation of Frank Miller’s militarist cartoon, and Watchmen was about as good as you can get making that series as a feature-length movie instead of the 12-part HBO series it should have been. But when Snyder moved his ultraviolence to the realm of actual four color superheroes, especially Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, it was clear that he didn’t get the point of those characters and the limitations of his tropes became that much more obvious. I have been told his remake of George A. Romero’s zombie classic Dawn Of The Dead was actually pretty good (if you like that sort of thing, which I don’t). So there was a certain amount of buzz when Snyder announced his next project was the straight-to-Netflix Army of the Dead.
What I don’t like about some movies is how they rely on what Siskel and Ebert called “the idiot plot” – as in, the plot can only proceed if the characters are idiots. In this case an Army convoy carrying a payload from “you know where” gets derailed by a pair of newlyweds on the road when they perform a maneuver you would know not to try if you’d ever seen The World According to Garp. As a result the “payload”, a zombie who seems as buff and invulnerable as the Hulk gets out, kills the soldiers and infects at least two of them, becoming the ‘patient zero’ who zombifies most of Vegas. At this point, you have another patented Snyder slo-mo montage for the opening credits, and the soundtrack is Richard Cheese singing ‘Viva Las Vegas’ as topless zombie showgirls eat a tourist in his hotel room. So already it’s going pretty good.
The movie stars Dave Bautista (Guardians of the Galaxy), and he’s actually pretty good as a burned-out veteran who lost his wife in the zombie plague then helped another housewife find her daughter in the chaos of Las Vegas only to see both of them get taken down by zombies just as the government literally dropped a barrier around the city (another essential plot point that makes absolutely no sense if you think about it at all). Now his daughter is a volunteer at the refugee camp the government set up outside the barrier, and those people are all supposed to be sent to Barstow before the military nukes the city and gets it over with. But before that, a billionaire casino owner hires Bautista to break into his casino and pull out its cash reserves from the safe, promising 50 million dollars to him and his crew. Naturally it turns out to be not that simple.
I don’t take Zombie Apocalypse shit very seriously, and it’s clear that Snyder doesn’t either, but there are some real moments of pathos within the black humor, such as the old man who finally hits the jackpot at the slot machine just as the zombies are flooding the casino. But overall, I’d say this is the best Zack Snyder movie I’ve seen, in that the ultraviolence actually works with the genre (if you ever wanted to see what a severed head looks like when it hits the ground from a great height, here ya go). And Snyder actually manages to cut down on the muddy shots and slow-motion action. Most of the time. And it comes down to the fact that Army of the Dead is actually fun, and that is not a word I normally associate with zombie movies, and even less with Zack Snyder movies.
It’s also a really good movie about Las Vegas insofar as it teaches the most important lesson about going to Vegas: The trick is not to make the money. The trick is to get out of town with it.