3/5 stars Zack Snyder is on a roll. After the so-called “Snyder cut” of his superhero ensemble Justice League gained generally appreciative reviews earlier this year, he’s back with Army of the Dead , a fun-packed zombie heist thriller. The film returns Snyder to the very beginnings of his filmmaking career when he remade George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead in 2004 – somewhat controversially, because it depicted zombies that ran rather than shuffled. Since then, these creatures have accelerated in popularity thanks to shows like The Walking Dead . But despite this surfeit of flesh-eaters on our screens, Army of the Dead , which Snyder co-scripted with Shay Hatten and Joby Harold, offers something different. Set in Las Vegas, a zombie outbreak has left the gambling capital of the world in ruins. With the city already walled off, a nuclear strike is planned to hit it on Independence Day – some real July 4 fireworks. Before the obliteration, Scott Ward ( Dave Bautista ), a former Vegas resident and burger chef who has done his bit fighting zombies, gets a proposition from Hiroyuki Sanada’s casino boss: get a team together, break through the quarantine zone and retrieve US$200 million stored in his casino’s vaults. Among his gang are mechanic Maria Cruz (Ana de la Reguera), a safe-cracker named Dieter (Matthias Schweighöfer) and his own estranged daughter Kate (Ella Purnell), who has her own reasons for going. The father-daughter dynamic is probably the least convincing aspect of the film, which really is about watching the muscle-mountain Bautista cracking zombie skulls. Fortunately, Snyder doesn’t take things too seriously here; case in point: Culture Club’s Do You Really Want to Hurt Me? is heard during one zombie killing spree in a lift. Other cuts are pretty evocative too – not least a burst of The Cranberries’ Zombie , a song that’s simply been crying out for use in a movie about the undead. Although the 2½-hour running time is indulgent, Snyder makes excellent use of his Las Vegas setting – with one shot of a zombie atop the replica Statue of Liberty particularly evocative. Given Dawn of the Dead , with its shopping centre setting, was a metaphor for consumerism, Snyder’s latest may be seen as a continuation of that – a reflection of a greed-driven, get-rich-quick society where the lure of money is too great to resist, even if it turns you into a flesh-eating zombie. However you want to read it, Army of the Dead is a thoroughly entertaining shoot ’em up. Army of the Dead will start streaming on Netflix on May 21. Want more articles like this? Follow SCMP Film on Facebook