There are lots of reasons that Army of the Dead (2021, Netflix) is worth your time. There are a few reasons that Army of the Dead is not worth your time. Let’s break it down.
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First off, Dave Bautista is a terrific actor, and he checks all the boxes here. The movie adds some human elements and emotional stakes among the gore and comedy, and while those are hit or miss, Bautista does his damndest to sell it all. I actually could have used more of the broken family stuff. Bautista has great chemistry with Ella Purnell, playing his estranged daughter. Their combination of distance and familiarity really worked for me, like in the scene where Bautista muses about what type of food that he’ll serve from the food truck that he hopes to buy with his share of the loot.
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But it’s not just Bautista and Purnell who are good. This movie has an incredible cast, from the green-screened Tig Notaro to Omari Hardwick and the perfectly cast Garrett Dillahunt. Oftentimes in modern moviemaking, one can find random internet celebrities filling vital roles, people brought on to the project because they have ten million YouTube subscribers but are also fully incapable of delivering their lines like a human being. That isn’t the case here (well, if there are TikTok stars among the cast, they held their own). Even the characters dispatched early are interesting and fun.
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So right away, we have a cast far better than is needed for a zombie heist movie released on Netflix. What else is good? There is the small matter of a zombie tiger that prowls the Vegas Strip. Does that do anything for you? What about Theo Rossi (Shades in the Marvel Netflix shows) showing up out of nowhere big-fishing people in the detainment center? I’d watch Rossi in just about anything, but him playing a pure shitheel is fantastic. There’s also enough gore in this movie that it borders on Grand Guignol / early Peter Jackson, although CGI blood is and will always be way less funny than squibs and red corn syrup. I laughed out loud at some of the more over-the-top violence, which, for my money, is about where you want to be with a good zombie movie.
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Let’s talk plot, if you still aren’t sold. A zombie outbreak overtakes Las Vegas, and people escape just as the United States surrounds the lost city with a wall made out of shipping crates. The government’s policy becomes one of indefinite containment of the zombies. And this policy also extended to the last people out of Vegas, who have been living in quarantine camps outside the city, where they are detained and must endure countless hardships, including living under the boot of people like the aforementioned Theo Rossi’s character Burt Cummings. (These camps have real-world analogues run by and in countries like the United States and Israel, so I was glad at least that these camps were unequivocally shown as immoral and inhumane.). The zombies stuck inside Vegas city limits have been there for years by the time our story unfolds, and the US government is done taking chances, and has decided to nuke the city to eradicate the zombies. A casino owner sees this as an opportunity to make a ton of money, so he hires some former soldiers to sneak through the wall, past the hordes of the undead, and into the safe under his abandoned casino, then to escape via helicopter with several hundred million in money that will otherwise soon be eradicated with the rest of the city. This is where Bautista et al. come in, as a team is assembled to take this chance.
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So we have zombies, we have a casino heist, we have old squadmates joining back up a few years after they were last killing zombies together. We have an estranged daughter and an imminent nuclear detonation. We have twists and turns, and a good bit of fun gore. Army of the Dead, overall, is a fun summer movie. Several plot twists surprised me. The opening credits montage was enjoyable. The color palette is a breath of fresh air after the browns and greys and other browns of Justice League. And we grow to care for (or, in some cases, despise) these characters, which adds resonance to the macabre calculus of a zombie movie.
The only downside for me is the painful soundtrack. Snyder remains an interesting visual stylist, and Army of the Dead is a better movie that anything he’s done in a while. But someone needs to send him a link to a Spotify playlist that isn’t labeled Mournful Covers of Classic Rock. That’s some college freshman shit right there. And once he has that playlist, he should consider just listening for fun. Not every needle drop in a movie has to directly speak to what’s happening on the screen at that time: sometimes it can add nuance, levity, pathos. Look at Wong Kar-Wai’s pop music in Chungking Express and Happy Together or Scorcese’s in Goodfellas. I was emotionally invested in Army of the Dead time and again, and then a sad Elvis cover (or, most egregiously, that Cranberries’ song at the very end) would yank me right out of it. Better writers than I have written about this, so I won’t belabor the point. But I think that the movie was an unexpected joy, and its only blackmark was the soundtrack.
If that sounds like nitpicking, well, it is. It’s a pretty good zombie movie! There’s not a lot to complain about. In fact, I’d suggest that you stop reading now and just go watch it. I’ll play you off.
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