When an  army transport carrying a top secret load gets into an accident that causes a much bigger explosion than it could have, said load escapes - a kung fu zombie, who kills or turns all the soldiers responsible for the transport, then heads for Las Vegas - which is soon overrun by zombies but walled off from the rest of the world and deemed to be nuked. Casino owner Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada) has no less than $200 million stored in a safe beneath his casino in Vegas, and of course wants them back, so he hires hero-fallen-on-hard-times Scott (Dave Bautista) to assemble a team of mercenaries who are to retrieve the money in exchange for $50 million. This team includes Maria (Ana de la Reguera), who's Scott's ex or something, Dieter (Matthias Schweighöfer), a safecracker - because despite it being his safe, Tanaka doesn't give them the combination to open it and only makes a fleeting remark that it's booby trapped -, Scott's own daughter Kate (Ella Purnell) - who needs to get into Vegas to rescue a friend, Geeta (Huma Qureshi) and who has of course issues with her father -, wisecracking chopper pilot Marianne (Tig Notaro) - who's to locate, fix and fly the escape chopper as one's not allowed to fly in but apparently flying out is not an issue -, and Martin (Garret Dillahunt) - Tanaka's man who apparently has his own agenda. At a refugee camp just outside Vegas, Scott recruits Lilly (Nora Arnezeder), who has been inside before several times and who is to be their guide, and she insists on bringing along sleazeball camp officer Cummings (Theo Rossi) - and once inside she shoots him in the leg to offer as sacrifice to the ruling zombie class in town, the kung fu zombies ... alpha zombies, who will give them safe passage in return. And soon enough, the zombie queen (Athena Peramble) has cummings dragged away to be turned. Thus our heroes make it to Tanaka's casino in relative safety, but there they find another kind of zombies, the hibernating zombies, which can be woken up by too much noise or light - so Martin wakes them up just to have a little revenge on teammember Chambers (Samantha Win), who dies a heroine's death in the process. Other than that, things go relatively hitchless, until Martin out of the blue captures and beheads the zombie queen, claiming this and not the retrieval of Tanaka's millions was the actual mission. But when the zombie king (Richard Cetrone) learns about this, all hell breaks loose and he, wearing a helmet, riding a zombie horse accompanied by a zombie tiger, leads his minions to storm Tanaka's casino. So ultimately, pretty much all of Scott's men and women are killed except for himself, his daughter and pilot Marianne, but things go from bad to worse when the nuking of Vegas is pushed forward a day with our heroes only having minutes to spare, and Kate finally veers off to rescue her friend ...

There are several scenes in Army of the Dead that are actually quite entertaining, and of the actors at least Matthias Schweighöfer as the naive and slightly effeminate German delivers a memorable performance. The first problem of the film though is despite a lengthy preposition all the characters remain paper-thin, so much so that when the first of them, Athena Peramble as Chambers, is killed, one doesn't really feel anything. And even Scott and Kate's father-daughter conflict, that is of course resolved over the running time of the movie, feels at best very clichéed and does little to drive the story. The next problem is that the film feels like a well-assembled yet somewhat mindless action movie, it's basically about tough guys and girls doing tough things, using guns and brawns instead of brains, while the zombies feel like the villain of the week, and are easily replaceable, especially, since there's no homogenous consept for them, some are of the stumbling, some of the hibernating, and some of the kung fu kind, and it seems nothing but the situation determines what they are or aren't capable of. As a result, there's no real zombie horror in this one at all. On a visual level, director Snyder, who also served as his own director of photography on this one, banks on extreme lack of depth throughout, which creates some nice effects here and there - but is over-used to the point of nausea.

In all, not a disaster, but at roughly 150 minutes it clocks in about an hour too long to be an entertaining zombie romp, especially since the film doesn't bring anything new to the genre, and it really feels like fluff throughout.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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