Starring Dave Bautista, Ella Purnell, Omari Hardwick, Ana de la Reguera, Theo Rossi, Hiroyuki Sanada, Tig Notaro, Huma Qureshi, Garret Dillahunt, Samantha Win, Nora Arnezeder, Matthias Schweighöfer, Raúl Castillo Jr.

(5-Okay Film)

Aimless. Exciting. Superficial.

Scott Ward: Think about it. Everything we did. All those people we saved. Look what it got us. But what if, just once, we did something for us?

Scott Ward (Bautista) is chosen by a sinister businessman, Bly Tanaka (Sanada), to retrieve a boatload of money locked in the center of Las Vegas, now decimated by the zombie outbreak. Ward puts together a team, and uses the opportunity to reconnect with his estranged daughter, Kate (Purnell). There are certain things I expect from a decent heist film, one example being a degree of cleverness. Army of the Dead lacks this most conspicuously, but it also lacks nearly every other aspect of a good heist the more I think about it. Promoted as a hybrid zombie-heist flick, Army of the Dead never cares much about its heist. The heist is simply a means of gathering a bunch of cool characters and pitting them against the zombies. Naturally, in traditional survival-horror fashion, they’re picked off one by one. This is mostly a brainless action film, which is perfectly fine (I love action), and there are several solid action scenes with a handful of appealing characters (Notaro, a late addition, stands out), but Army of the Dead is well short of what it promises. The humor and style at the beginning of the picture dries up pretty quickly, and the grim second half fails to deliver any scares.

-Walter Tyrone Howard-

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