Zach Snyder’s new
Las Vegas zombie heist romp shows film’s long love affair with the undead is very much alive and kicking
For devotees of maximalist blockbuster merchant Zack Snyder, you’d think 2021 had already yielded quite enough excitement. The result of what online fan armies can achieve through sheer vocal persistence, the director’s four-hour cut of his botched 2017 superhero pileup Justice League – out on DVD on Monday – was released on Sky Cinema and Now TV in March, though its colossal swelling of essentially generic material probably won few converts to the Snyder cult.
Yet two months later, another great big slab of Snyder has landed on
Netflix, and this one’s more fun. Weighing in at a comparatively modest 148 minutes, his Las Vegas-set zombie heist romp Army of the Dead is a cheerful hodgepodge of genres that largely dispenses with the murky self-importance of his superhero efforts to focus on B-movie priorities: chiefly, amped-up, crowd-pleasing action and grand sloshes of gore. Having some time ago been colonised by the undead and quarantined with a containing wall, Sin City is about to be nuked by the government – though $200m lies within, and a casino boss enlists former zombie fighter Dave Bautista to break into the zombie colony and retrieve the dough.