ReviewNetflix movie review: Army of the Dead – Zack Snyder’s zombie heist thriller offers an entertaining shoot ’em up

A zombie outbreak has left Las Vegas in ruins and before a planned nuclear strike takes it out, Dave Bautista must retrieve US$200 million from a casino vault

Forget about the plot – this film is all about watching Bautista’s character cracking zombie skulls

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Dave Bautista (front) and Nora Arnezeder in a still from Army of the Dead. Photo: Netflix

Published: 10:00pm, 11 May 2021Updated: 4:45pm, 21 May 2021

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.