Army of the Dead

I don't understand what happened to Zack Snyder, a guy who has the brilliant Watchmen and the very good Man of Steel in his filmography and never really burned out creatively until now, to make shit like this. Pathetic, fucking boring and visually repulsive (no, the juicy opening credits and those few Las Vegas green screens don't cut it). It has only one decent action scene – the casino shootout – which doesn't come until half an hour before the end, and one single noteworthy idea, which is the zombie tiger. And leading the uninteresting ensemble of actors is Dave Bautista, whose acting limits end somewhere near Hamáček's abilities when he talks about his disguise maneuver. (2021-05-24)

You should listen to Daddy! A perverse action B-movie that is pleasant to watch, despite its length. As most Netflix productions, it stays somewhere half-way between cinema and TV. Snyder blew logic to smithereens (nuked it) and in the end they no longer even try to explain anything. Maybe he just skimped the job. He simply presents what he finds cool and you just have to take it or leave it. The zombie tiger, walking through the traps, the totally over-the-top ending in the helicopter. The disco. (2021-05-24)

So sloppy, it's like nobody was trying very hard with Army of the Dead. The characters are so uninteresting that I didn't care what order they died in, the actors have no charisma or nothing to work with, and the first really interesting and entertaining action scene3 doesn't come until sometime at the beginning of the last quarter. Once they start shooting and slashing properly, it's quite fun, with Snyder keeping himself in check, so there aren't nearly enough of those slow-motion sequences to make it boring, it's just that there's about an hour of completely unnecessary ballast that is boring, where the most entertaining thing is how it all makes no sense at all. Sure, in a B-action flick, that shouldn't really matter, it's just that Army of the Dead may be a B-movie, but it really isn’t. There's climactic brutality , it only falls into the horror category because there are zombies. And Snyder's playing with the camera, which often leads to ugly visuals full of out-of-focus shots (which was supposedly the artistic intent), is more annoying than effective. I don't know. An hour after the closing credits, I can recall virtually nothing of it. Just that I was expecting a lot more than another routine Netflix movie, and I really didn't have those expectations particularly high. An unimaginative and boring waste of time. (2021-05-21)

An unreasonably overblown runtime and a quantum of Snyder’s love it or hate it style in a solid (read through and through bland) unacknowledged adaptation of “Dead Rising 2”. It actually works quite well as a tired C-rated video game adaptation, but not so well as a zombie heist B-movie that plays with the rules of the genre. It undeniably has its strong moments and scenes (marred by shaky camerawork), but there are fewer than one would expect from the self-proclaimed king of "tinsel cool" on a project where he had a free hand. (2021-05-21)

I think I could enjoy a stupidly scripted zombie horror B-movie, but in this case most of my disappointment stems from the fact that there was no ambition whatsoever to make anything resembling horror. The tone is just overstuffed action nonsense that happens to feature zombies, and I was also surprised at how ugly it looks in many sequences. Moreover, such a banal film, which narratively and conceptually does not bring anything original and interesting, cannot be two and a half hours long for God's sake! You could throw away 45 minutes without any problem. Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead is on another league and I’m afraid we will never see anything like it again from Zack. (2021-05-26)