Movie Review: Army of the Dead (2021)

Director Zack Snyder is back with a follow-up to his 2004 film Dawn of the Dead. Was he able to recapture that magic from 17 years ago? No. While it wasn’t a total failure, it had a lot of drawbacks that were too glaring to make the good parts prevalent enough to matter much in the big picture.

First of all, let’s talk about the 2.5-hour runtime. This was really unnecessary. The story that they were telling was not important enough to warrant this amount of time. The story itself was actually pretty bland for the most part, and a lot of it really didn’t make sense. The short version is that a rich guy hires a team of grunts to break into a vault under a casino in Las Vegas to get millions in cash. The problem is that there are thousands of zombies there because they built a wall around Las Vegas to lock them in there. It’s essentially a heist movie with zombies.

There was a huge plot hole having to do with the film’s main premise that arises when a significant twist comes up. We can’t really go into detail here without spoiling the film, but let’s just say that a lot of plot points go right out the window. A lot of the characters’ dialogue and actions also seemed very lazy. This can somewhat be given a pass because this is more of an action/thriller than horror, but it’s inexcusable to be this lazy when using the “…of the Dead” franchise as a selling point. From an action film perspective, it would be considered ok, but if this is a follow-up to Dawn of the Dead it’s mostly only in subtle references and in name.

The redeeming qualities of the film were mostly in its acting. Dave Bautista was starring and did a great job. Tig Notaro who had replaced Chris D’Elia digitally (for good reason) and was never even on-set also was nice to see, even though at times her acting did seem off as she was inserted into the film afterward. There were admittedly some scenes that were pretty fun, but they were few and far between.

Overall, if you are looking for a good zombie film, this isn’t it. It shares the name of the Romero franchise, and Zack Snyder wrote and directed this, but we wouldn’t watch it again. It’s more of a bad “What if…” story that happens in the future of some parallel “…of the Dead” universe and not a good one. Snyder took too much liberty here with the writing. In our opinion, this would have been great if he had thought about how Romero would have approached it. His Dawn of the Dead entry proved that he has the capability. He just seemingly got carried away and decided a heist movie would be better.

You can see the trailer for Army of the Dead below, and it is available to stream via Netflix.