Army of the Dead on Netflix. 3/10.
Granted, I watched it more as a background movie while drinking and talking with my friends so maybe I missed something brilliant. But the fact that the annoyances bubbled up even in that context should be a dire enough mark against the movie.
It's about as Zack Snyder as you get: shallow, style over substance, indulgent, massively overlong, takes itself way too seriously for the premise, only slightly pretentious this time, and all the music choices are cringe-inducingly on the nose and unoriginal. And because I thought of another analogy I don't want to go to waste, the movie is like a classic zombie in itself: mindless, aimless, slow, not a hint of depth or thought in it, and barely capable of doing even the most basic functions. And to go for a third analogy because fuck you: It's a movie version of an overlong Call of Duty Zombies map where all the players have aimbot enabled. The two decent things about it are the zombie makeup, and the fact that the actors do a decent job with what they're given. That I would say for all Zack Snyder movies save for Sucker Punch, which is in a category of suck(er punch) all of its own.
More perhaps than ever before I wondered how self-aware a filmmaker Zack Snyder is with this movie. I definitely laughed more at the movie than with the movie. The premise and (massively overlong) opening montage hint at a jolly good tongue in cheek 90-minute splatterfest. But the movie itself is very drab, dour, slow, grim and serious. You can seriously skip like the first 50 minutes, because that's how long it takes for the movie to even get to Las Vegas. Everything prior to that is introducing all these stock characters you don't care about and going over meaningless technical detail. And even once they get to Las Vegas it's a lot of slow walking around, maneuvering around zombies and people speaking at each other angrily. For a 2,5 hour zombie movie this movie is also shockingly lacking in satisfying gore. Despite its R rating most of the violence takes place in dark rooms and hallways where most details are conveniently obscured, and whatever few moments of genuine splatter there are are cut very quickly away from. There's hardly any tension, it's never scary, the music is confusingly unfitting when it's not painfully on the nose and there's plenty of very dumb visuals that aren't even the fun kind of dumb, they just feel embarrassing. For some reason there's also an element of zombie romance (yes, you read that right) present, which is just another part where I wondered how seriously Snyder wanted me to take the whole thing.
There's a halfway decent 85-minute zombie flick here buried underneath all the bloat, but even then it would have all the Snyderisms that plague his every movie. It seriously feels like Snyder thought "zombies in the Vegas strip would look cool" and nothing beyond that. And made that thought into a 2,5 hour movie instead of a 5-minute music video. Dawn of the Dead '04 this is not. Skip it.
