Zombie movies, which have been shambling across movie screens since at least the 1930s, have an undying appeal. But their enduring popularity is a little odd, when you think about it, since a zombie, by definition, is generally slow in pursuit of its victims and has to rely on the frequent inclination of fleeing humans to trip over something or other and fall to the ground to await their gruesome fate. (Nowadays, the once-shuffling creatures are actually quite speedy.)
The latest zombie exercise is the work of Zack Snyder, who began his directorial career with a remake of zombie auteur George Romero's 1978 "Dawn of the Dead" and has now returned to the genre with a sort of monster mashup called "Army of the Dead." The story, cooked up by Snyder (who also shot the film), Shay Hatten and Joby Harold, is a bloody combo of straight zombie horror and reconfigured Vegas heist flick, along the lines of the "Ocean's Eleven" pictures, and some of it's pretty entertaining.
The picture begins auspiciously. We see a military convoy making its way across the Nevada desert after a visit to the quasi-mysterious military base called Area 51, where it has picked up an unspecified payload in a large shipping container. During a sudden collision with a civilian vehicle, the container is damaged and a big, flesh-ripping zombie escapes from it. After killing most of the convoy's attendant guards, this creature sets out for nearby Las Vegas along with two soldiers it has toothily recruited to the zombie cause.
What follows — a montage of zombie mayhem set in a glittery casino — is a series of quick, witty anecdotes: There's a blood-drooling Elvis impersonator, a gaggle of topless zombie showgirls — that sort of thing. (Later, there's a zombie tiger — the movie's most ingenious effect — that's said to have once been a part of the Siegfried & Roy troupe.) There's also the usual uproarious slaughter — zombies biting juicily into human necks, gun-wielding humans blowing off chunks of zombie skulls — which, as you'd expect in a Snyder film, goes on way too long.
Set against the rampaging zombies is a group of mercenaries assembled by a heroic combat veteran named Scott Ward (the very large and likable Dave Bautista). Ward has been offered $50 million by an enigmatic casino owner named Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada) to retrieve an enormous cache of money from the vault of his gaming emporium on the Vegas Strip. To help carry out this mission, Ward naturally recruits a team of specialists, among them a wisecracking female chopper pilot named Peters (Tig Notaro, recalling the wisecracking female chopper pilot in James Cameron's 1986 "Aliens"); a devious military spy on the team named Martin (Garret Dillahunt), who's not unlike the devious corporate spy played by Paul Reiser in "Aliens"); and a German safecracker named Dieter (Matthias Schweighofer), who for some reason describes the vault he's about to break into as "a door to another realm" — very much recalling when the corrupt archeologist Belloq in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" told Indy, "It's a radio for speaking to God!"
The echoes of long-popular movies are strangely numerous. We see someone running a gantlet of whizzing poison darts (a la "Raiders"), a woman discovering a hiding little girl the way Sigourney Weaver discovered the hiding little Carrie Henn in "Aliens" and a champagne bucket filled with ice cubes that's knocked over in just the way one was in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom." These derivative elements are either clever or, after a while, laborious, depending on your POV.
The plot is juiced a bit by the knowledge that Ward and his team must get in and out of Vegas before the military nukes it. But how nervous could anyone who's ever seen a Hollywood movie be about this? And while Snyder must have been hoping to add some emotional resonance to the film by giving Ward an estranged daughter name Kate (Ella Purnell), the actors have too little chemistry to make us care much about her pissy resentment of his past paternal failures. ("You didn't call. You didn't visit. ..."). By the end, an uncharitable observer might begin to wonder if Ward wasn't wasting at least one too many bullets on the zombies.
Kurt Loder is the film critic for Reason Online. To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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