Army of the Dead (2021)

There's a moment early in Army of the Dead where you think, right, maybe this is actually going to be a good time. Las Vegas has been quarantined behind a wall of shipping containers, the desert is littered with the undead, and Zack Snyder's camera is doing that slow-motion, hyper-stylised thing he does, and it looks genuinely cool. The zombie gore effects are creative, detailed, and satisfyingly grim. You sit up a little. You think: I'm in.

Then the film opens its mouth, and the illusion shatters.

What follows is nearly two and a half hours of a film that can't decide what it wants to be. A zombie film? A heist movie? A father-daughter drama? A mythology-building franchise starter with a zombie queen and a whole hierarchy of the undead? Army of the Dead tries to be all of these things simultaneously, and manages none of them with any conviction. Subplots are introduced and abandoned. Character motivations shift with the wind. The logic of the world is established and then cheerfully ignored whenever the plot needs it to be. It doesn't so much juggle its ideas as drop them all on the floor and hope you don't notice.

The cast is a particular problem. You've got a roster of stock character types, the grizzled mercenary, the comic relief, the untrustworthy weasel, the tough woman with a past, and so on, but none of them are given anything interesting to do or say. The performances range from wooden to wildly overcooked, with almost nothing in between. I never found myself caring whether any of them made it out of Vegas alive, which is a fairly fundamental failure for an action film built around survival. When characters die, and they do, often, the film reaches for emotional weight it simply hasn't earned. These scenes drag on, asking you to feel something for people you barely know and don't particularly like.

The humour doesn't help matters either. The jokes land somewhere between cringey and mean-spirited, rarely finding the light, self-aware tone a film like this desperately needs. Compare it to something like Dawn of the Dead (2004), which Snyder also directed, and the gap in quality is startling. That film had energy, genuine tension, and characters you actually wanted to survive. This one has a bloated runtime and a mysterious zombie queen who turns up, looks interesting, and is then largely wasted.

And that's the real frustration. The building blocks of something fun are absolutely here. A zombie heist in a quarantined Las Vegas is a brilliant premise. The creature design is genuinely impressive, fast, intelligent-looking zombies rendered with real craft and some spectacularly grim practical effects. There are moments, scattered throughout, where the action looks brilliant on a purely visual level. But looking cool and being exciting are not the same thing, and Army of the Dead confuses the two constantly. The set pieces lack stakes because you're not invested in who's fighting. The tension never builds properly because the pacing is all over the place, lurching between slow, unconvincing emotional scenes and loud, chaotic action with no real rhythm to it.

At its running length, the film doesn't just overstay its welcome, it practically moves its furniture in. Every time you think it's building towards something, it detours into another subplot that goes nowhere, or lingers on a character moment that hasn't been set up well enough to pay off. The editing feels like it's working against the film rather than with it.

I'll be straight with you: the make-up and practical effects work is the only reason this scrapes above a one-star rating. The people responsible for the zombie design did genuinely excellent work, and it's a shame it's all in service of something this hollow. If you're desperate for a zombie fix, honestly, go back and watch Dawn of the Dead (2004) again. It'll remind you what Snyder is capable of when he's working with a tighter script and actual stakes.

One and a half stars. Barely.

Rating: ★½  | Year: 2021  | Watched: 2025-09-01

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon US

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